Documentation

The Siding Spring Southern Seyfert Spectroscopic Snapshot Survey (S7) present results on 64 galaxies drawn from the first data release. The S7 uses the Wide Field Spectrograph (WiFeS) mounted on the ANU 2.3m telescope located at the Siding Spring Observatory to deliver an integral field of 38×25 arcsec at a spectral resolution of R = 7000 in the red (530−710nm), and R = 3000 in the blue (340 − 560nm). From these data cubes we have extracted the Narrow Line Region (NLR) spectra from a 4 arc sec aperture centred on the nucleus. We also determine the Hβ and [O III] λ5007 fluxes in the narrow lines, the nuclear reddening, the reddening-corrected relative intensities of the observed emission lines, and the Hβ and [O III] λ5007 luminosities determined from spectra for which the stellar continuum has been removed.

The S7 survey is by no means a complete survey of southern Seyfert, LINERs and other active galaxies but rather, offers a reasonably representative sample of radio-detected AGN in the nearby universe. The objects for the S7 were selected from the Véron-Cetty & Véron (2006) catalogue of active galaxies, which remains the most comprehensive compilation of active galaxies in the literature. Since, in the future, we wish to investigate the interaction of the bipolar plasma jets with the Narrow Line Region and the ISM of the host galaxy, we limited the sample to galaxies with radio flux densities high enough to permit radio aperture synthesis observations.

We adopted the following selection criteria:

• Declination < 10° to avoid observations being made at too great a zenith distance. At a zenith distance of 60 degrees, the atmospheric dispersion between 3500 and 7000 Å is nearly 6 arcsec,which would seriously compromise the effective field coverage.
• Galactic latitude > |20| degrees (with a few exceptions in the case of objects known to have an associated ENLR ). This galactic latitude requirement is set to avoid excessive galactic extinction.
• Radio flux density at 20cm > 20mJy for those targets with declination N of -40°, which have NVSS measurements, and
• Redshift < 0.02. This criterion (D < 80 Mpc) ensures that the spatial resolution of the data is better than 400 pc per arcsec, sufficient to resolve the ENLR, and to ensure that the important diagnostic [S II] lines are still within the spectral range of the WiFeS high-resolution red grating.