Radio continuum survey of an optically selected sample of nearby Seyfert galaxies

We have used the Very Large Array (VLA) to conduct a survey for radio continuum emission in the sample of 52 Seyfert nuclei selected from the optical spectroscopic galaxy catalog of Ho, Filippenko, & Sargent. This Seyfert sample is the most complete and least biased available, and, as such, it will be useful for a variety of statistical analyses. Here we present the observations, measurements, and an atlas of radio maps. The observations were made at 6 cm in the B array and at 20 cm in the A array, yielding matched angular resolutions of similar to1. We detected 44 objects (85%) at 6 cm and 37 objects (71%) at 20 cm above a 3 sigma threshold of 0.12 mJy beam(-1). The sources have a wide range of radio powers (P approximate to 10(18)-10(25) W Hz(-1)), spectral indices (alpha (20)(6) approximate to +0.5 to -1), and linear sizes (L approximate to few tens pc-15 kpc). The morphology of the radio emission is predominantly that of a compact core, either unresolved or slightly resolved, occasionally accompanied by elongated, jetlike features. Linearly polarized emission was detected at 6 cm in 12 sources, nine of which were also detected at 20 cm.