A redshift survey has been carried out in the region of the Hubble Deep Field
North using the Low Resolution Imaging Spectrograph at the Keck Observatory.
The resulting redshift catalog, which contains 671 entries, is a compendium of
our own data together with published LRIS/Keck data. It is more than 92%
complete for objects, irrespective of morphology, to R=24 mag in the HDF
itself and to R=23 mag in the Flanking Fields within a diameter of 8 arcmin
centered on the HDF, an unusually high completion for a magnitude limited
survey performed with a large telescope. A median redshift z=1.0 is reached
at R∼23.8.
Strong peaks in the redshift distribution, which arise when a group or poor
cluster of galaxies intersect the area surveyed, can be identified to z∼1.2 in this dataset. More than 68% of the galaxies are members of these
redshift peaks. In a few cases, closely spaced peaks in z can be resolved
into separate groups of galaxies that can be distinguished in both velocity and
location on the sky.
The radial separation of these peaks in the pencil-beam survey is consistent
with a characteristic length scale for the their separation of ≈70 Mpc
in our adopted cosmology (h=0.6,ΩM=0.3, Λ=0). Strong
galaxy clustering is in evidence at all epochs back to z≤1.1. (abstract
abridged)Comment: Accepted to the ApJ. This version contains all the figures and
tables. 2 minor typos in table 2b correcte