Motivation

The ESO/SERC R-Survey of the southern sky is the observational contribution of ESO to the first complete sky survey south of -15°declination. The other part, the ESO/SERC J-Survey, was carried out in Australia. The ESO-Schmidt telescope at La Silla produced 606 photographic red plates covering some 15000 square degrees of the sky, the UK Schmidt Telescope in Coonabarabran, Australia, took the corresponding 606 blue/green J-plates. Sky coverage of the same order of magnitude is still far beyond the range of CCDs - which were not even introduced into astronomy when the atlas project started in the early 1970s -, and wide-field telescopes specially designed for CCD imaging are only in the planning stage. Nobody knows the time scales on which an equivalent or deeper CCD survey can be realized.

The Sky Atlas Laboratory at ESO-Garching - as before in Geneva - took the responsibility of producing and editing both parts of the ESO/SERC Atlas, including the laborious tasks of quality controls, partially re-evaluating the original photographs as well as and checking every single one of almost 200,000 glass or film copies from the total of 2 * 606 atlas fields, to ensure highest quality before they were distributed to hundreds of institutions around the world.

The J-atlas, the observational contribution of the UK, was digitized at two UK institutions: at the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge with the APM machine and at the Royal Observatory Edinburgh with the COSMOS machine. It thus seemed appropriate to have the R-atlas digitized in an ESO member country. The Astronomical Institute of Münster University (AIM) took up the challenge - not only because we needed the catalogues for our own work, there were also some ulterior motives. One reason was getting an additional PDS 2020GMplus microdensitometer (thanks to the Federal Ministry of Science and Technology of Germany) for the time consuming task of scanning. Both PDS machines were equipped with powerful new amplifiers, developed and constructed at AIM (the ``plus'' to the original name indicates this addition), which permit us to use the double-slit machines to the mechanical limit of their scanning speed of 200 mm s ^-1. Another reason is our contribution the ROSAT source identification. While Edinburgh has provided ROSAT headquarters at the Max Planck Institut für Extraterrestische Physik in Garching with catalogues from the J-plates, AIM provides R-catalogues. Last not least, the data base resulting from the R-atlas is a tribute to the two people who created the red atlas: to Hans-Emil Schuster, who dedicated many years on La Silla to the tedious and responsible task of taking the plates - as earlier for the ESO Quick Blue Survey (QBS) - and training his assistants to perfection, and to Richard West who, together with his able helpers, produced the complete atlases at ESO headquarters - as he now edits the new three-colour POSSII/ESO Survey.