Extragalactic large-scale structures behind the southern Milky Way

As part of our efforts to unveil extragalactic large-scale structures behind the southern Milky Way, we here present redshifts for 764 galaxies in the Hydra/Antlia, Crux and Great Attractor region ($266^\circ \le \ell \le 338^\circ$, $|\,b\,| \la 10^\circ$), obtained with the Meudon-ESO Fibre Object Spectrograph (MEFOS) at the 3.6-m telescope of ESO. The observations are part of a redshift survey of partially obscured galaxies recorded in the course of a deep optical galaxy search behind the southern Milky Way (Kraan-Korteweg [CITE]; Woudt & Kraan-Korteweg [CITE]). A total of 947 galaxies have been observed, a small percentage of the spectra ($N = 109$, 11.5%) were contaminated by foreground stars, and 74 galaxies (7.8%) were too faint to allow a reliable redshift determination. With MEFOS we obtained spectra down to the faintest galaxies of our optical galaxy survey, and hence probe large-scale structures out to larger distances ($v \la 30\,000$ km s-1) than our other redshift follow-ups using the 1.9-m telescope at the South African Astronomical Observatory (Kraan-Korteweg et al. [CITE]; Fairall et al. [CITE]; Woudt et al. [CITE]) and the 64-m Parkes radio telescope (Kraan-Korteweg et al. [CITE]). The most distinct large-scale structures revealed in the southern Zone of Avoidance are discussed in context to known structures adjacent to the Milky Way