Extragalactic large-scale structures behind the southern Milky Way - IV. Redshifts obtained with MEFOS

As part of our efforts to unveil extragalactic large-scale structures behind the southern Milky Way, we here present redshifts for 764 galaxies in the Hydra / Antlia, Crux and Great Attractor region (266degrees less than or equal to l less than or equal to 338degrees, \b\ less than or similar to 10degrees), obtained with the Meudon-ESO Fibre Object Spectrograph ( MEFOS) at the 3.6-m telescope of ESO. The observations are part of a redshift survey of partially obscured galaxies recorded in the course of a deep optical galaxy search behind the southern Milky Way (Kraan-Korteweg 2000; Woudt & Kraan-Korteweg 2001). A total of 947 galaxies have been observed, a small percentage of the spectra (N = 109, 11.5%) were contaminated by foreground stars, and 74 galaxies (7.8%) were too faint to allow a reliable redshift determination. With MEFOS we obtained spectra down to the faintest galaxies of our optical galaxy survey, and hence probe large-scale structures out to larger distances (v less than or similar to 30 000 km s(-1)) than our other redshift follow-ups using the 1.9-m telescope at the South African Astronomical Observatory (Kraan-Korteweg et al. 1995; Fairall et al. 1998; Woudt et al. 1999) and the 64-m Parkes radio telescope (Kraan-Korteweg et al. 2002). The most distinct large-scale structures revealed in the southern Zone of Avoidance are discussed in context to known structures adjacent to the Milky Way.