The Kast ground-based ultraviolet spectral survey of 79 quasi-stellar objects at redshift 2 for Lyα forest and metal absorption

We present spectra of 79 bright QSOs obtained with the Kast spectrograph on the 3 m Shane Telescope at Lick Observatory. The QSOs have emission redshifts 1.89 - 2.45, and most are near the mean value of z(em) = 2.17. Two of them, one a new discovery, are broad absorption line QSOs. The spectra have similar to250 km s(-1) resolution, and they cover 3175 - 5880 Angstrom with signal-to-noise ratios of 6 - 20 per 1.13 Angstrom pixel in the Lyalpha forest between Lyalpha and Lybeta. We show the continuum levels that we used in a previous paper to make a calibrated measurement of the amount of absorption in the Lyalpha forest at z = 1.9. We measure redshifts for 140 absorption-line systems, and we list the metal ions that we see in each system. We identify 526 emission lines and list their observed wavelengths, which we use to obtain new emission redshifts. We find that three emission lines, or line blends, in the forest have mean rest wavelengths of 1070.95 +/- 1.00, 1123.13 +/- 0.51, and 1175.88 +/- 0.30 Angstrom.