The Bright SHARC Survey: The cluster catalog

We present the Bright SHARC (Serendipitous High-Redshift Archival ROSAT Clu ster) Survey, which is an objective search for serendipitously detected ext ended X-ray sources in 460 deep ROSAT PSPC pointings. The Bright SHARC Surv ey covers an area of 178.6 deg(2) and has yielded 374 extended sources. We discuss the X-ray data reduction, the candidate selection and present resul ts from our ongoing optical follow-up campaign. The optical follow-up conce ntrates on the brightest 94 of the 374 extended sources and is now 97% comp lete. We have identified 37 clusters of galaxies, for which we present reds hifts and luminosities. The clusters span a redshift range of 0.0696 < z < 0.83 and a luminosity range of 0.065 < L-X < 8.3 x 10(44) ergs s(-1) [0.5-2 .0 keV] (assuming H-0 = 50 km s(-1) Mpc(-1) and q(0) = 0.5). Twelve of the clusters have redshifts greater than z = 0.3, eight of which are at luminos ities brighter than L-X = 3 x 10(44) ergs s(-1) Seventeen of the 37 optical ly confirmed Bright SHARC clusters have not been listed in any previously p ublished catalog. We also report the discovery of three candidate "fossil g roups" of the kind proposed by Ponman et al.