The Southern Sky Redshift Survey

We report redshifts, magnitudes, and morphological classifications for 5369 galaxies with m_B <= 15.5 and for 57 galaxies fainter than this limit, in two regions covering a total of 1.70 sr in the southern celestial hemisphere. The galaxy catalog is drawn primarily from the list of nonstellar objects identified in the Hubble Space Telescope Guide Star Catalog (GSC). The galaxies have positions accurate to ~1" and magnitudes with an rms scatter of ~0.3 mag. We compute magnitudes (m_SSRS2) from the relation between instrumental GSC magnitudes and the photometry by Lauberts & Valentijn. From a comparison with CCD photometry, we find that our system is homogeneous across the sky and corresponds to magnitudes measured at the isophotal level ~26 mag arcsec^-2. The precision of the radial velocities is ~40 km s^-1, and the redshift survey is more than 99% complete to the m_SSRS2 = 15.5 mag limit. This sample is in the direction opposite that of the CfA2; in combination the two surveys provide an important database for studies of the properties of galaxies and their large-scale distribution in the nearby universe. Based on observations obtained at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, National Optical Astronomy Observatories, operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., under cooperative agreement with the National Science Foundation; Complejo Astronomico El Leoncito, operated under agreement between the Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas de la República Argentina and the National Universities of La Plata, Córdoba, and San Juan; the European Southern Observatory, La Silla, Chile, partially under the bilateral ESO-Observatório Nacional agreement; Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory; Laboratório Nacional de Astrofísica, Brazil; and the South African Astronomical Observatory.