The Edinburgh-Cape Blue Object Survey - I. Description of the survey

The Edinburgh-Cape Blue Object Survey is a major survey to discover blue stellar objects brighter than B~18 in the southern sky. It is planned to cover an area of sky of 10000 deg^2 with --b-->30 deg and delta<0 deg. The blue stellar objects are selected by automatic techniques from U and B pairs of UK Schmidt Telescope plates scanned with the COSMOS measuring machine. Follow-up photometry and spectroscopy are being obtained with the SAAO telescopes to classify objects brighter than B=16.5. This paper describes the survey, the techniques used to extract the blue stellar objects, the photometric methods and accuracy, the spectroscopic classification, and the limits and completeness of the survey.