Deep optical imaging of the egret-detected blazars

We have an ongoing program with the 2.56m Nordic Optical Telescope on La Pa lms to take very deep, subarcsecond optical images of all the blazars detec ted by the EGRET experiment onboard the GRO-satellite and of a comparison s ample of blazars that EGRET has observed BUT NOT detected. Our goal is to s tudy the host galaxy properties and the close blazar neighbourhood in both samples in order to search for possible differencies among their morphologi cal and environmental properties. First preliminary results of this program are shown.