Spectroscopic catalog of 10 rich galaxy clusters

The clusters span the redshift range z=0.37-0.56 and are the subject of a detailed ground- and space-based study to investigate the evolution of galaxies as a function of environment and epoch. The data presented here include positions, photometry, redshifts, spectral line strengths, and classifications for 657 galaxies in the fields of the 10 clusters.

The catalog is composed of 424 cluster members across the 10 clusters and 233 field galaxies, with detailed morphological information from our WFPC2 images for 204 of the cluster galaxies and 71 in the field. We illustrate some basic properties of the catalog, including correlations between the morphological and spectral properties of our large sample of cluster galaxies. A direct comparison of the spectral properties of the high-redshift cluster and field populations suggests that the phenomenon of strong Balmer lines in otherwise passive galaxies (commonly called E + A but renamed here as the k + a class) shows an order-of-magnitude increase in the rich cluster environment compared with a more modest increase in the field population.