The ATESP radio survey. II. The source catalogue

This paper is part of a series reporting the results of the Australia Telescope ESO Slice Project (ATESP) radio survey obtained at 1400 MHz with the Australia Telescope Compact Array (ATCA) over the region covered by the ESO Slice Project (ESP) galaxy redshift survey. The survey consists of 16 radio mosaics with ~ 8arcsec x 14arcsec resolution and uniform sensitivity (1 sigma noise level ~ 79 mu Jy) over the whole area of the ESP redshift survey ( ~ 26 sq. degrees at delta ~ -40degr ). Here we present the catalogue derived from the ATESP survey. We detected 2960 distinct radio sources down to a flux density limit of ~ 0.5 mJy (6sigma ), 1402 being sub-mJy sources. We describe in detail the procedure followed for the source extraction and parameterization. The internal accuracy of the source parameters was tested with Monte Carlo simulations and possible systematic effects (e.g. bandwidth smearing) have been quantified.