  We present two catalogues of galaxies in the direction of the rich cluster
Abell 496. The first one includes 3,879 galaxies located in a region of roughly
1.3 degrees from the cluster centre. It has been obtained from a list of more
than 35,000 galaxy candidates detected by scanning part of a Schmidt
photographic plate taken in the b_J band. Positions are very accurate in this
catalogue but magnitudes are not. This led us to perform CCD imaging
observations in the V and R bands to calibrate these photographic magnitudes. A
second catalogue gives a list of galaxies with CCD magnitudes in the V (239
galaxies) and R (610 galaxies) bands for a much smaller region in the centre of
the cluster. These two catalogues will be combined with a redshift catalogue of
466 galaxies (Durret et al. 1999) to investigate the cluster properties at
optical wavelengths (Durret et al. in preparation), as a complement to previous
X-ray studies by a member of our group (Pislar 1998).

Astrophysics