Substructure in clusters containing wide-angle-tailed radio galaxies. I. New redshifts

We present new redshifts and positions for 635 galaxies in nine rich cluste rs containing wide-angle tailed (WAT) radio galaxies. Combined with existin g data, we now have a sample of 18 WAT-containing clusters with more than 1 0 redshifts. This sample contains a substantial portion of the WAT clusters in the VLA 20 cm survey of Abell clusters, including 75% of WAT clusters i n the complete survey (z less than or equal to 0.09), and 20% of WAT cluste rs with z > 0.09. It is a representative sample, which should not contain b iases other than selection by radio morphology. We graphically present the new data using histograms and sky maps. A semiautomated procedure is used t o search for emission lines in the spectra in order to add and verify galax y redshifts. We find that the average apparent fraction of emission-line ga laxies is about 9% in both the clusters and the field. We investigate the m agnitude completeness of our redshift surveys with CCD data for a test case , Abell 690. This case indicates that our galaxy target lists are deeper th an the detection limit of a typical MX exposure, and they are 82% complete down to R = 19.0. The importance of the uniformity of the placement of fibe rs on targets is posited, and we evaluate this in our data sets. We find so me cases of nonuniformities which may influence dynamical analyses. A secon d paper will use this database to look for correlations between the WAT rad io morphology and the cluster's dynamical state.