HST Snapshot Survey of 3CR Quasars: The Data

Abstract

We present images taken with the Wide Field Planetary Camera (WFPC-2) on the Hubble Space Telescope of 43 quasars selected from the 3CR radio catalog. The redshift range of the targets is large --- 0.3 < z < 2. These data were taken in the course of a large program that imaged 267 3CR radio galaxies and quasars using the HST in &#34;snapshot mode&#34;. Each quasar was centered on the Planetary Camera (PC1) and was imaged through the F702W filter (bandpass similar to Cousins R), typically for 5 and 10 minutes. Our analysis suggests that the quasar fuzz contributes from <5% to nearly 100% in the most extreme case (about 20% being typical) of the total light from the quasar, with 16 of the quasars (~40%) being unresolved according to the analysis of their light profiles (with only 7 being considered unresolved determined by PSF subtraction of the quasar images). Most of the host galaxies show twisted, asymmetric, or distorted isophotes. About 1/4 of the quasar hosts have close (within a few arc seconds) companions seen in projection and about 1/10 show obvious signs of tidal interactions with a close companion. We find that these sources exhibit a tendency for the principal axes of the radio and optical emission to align similar but perhaps weaker than that observed for radio galaxies.