The ATESP radio survey II. The source catalogue

This paper is part of a series reporting the results of the Australia Telescope ESO Slice Project (ATESP) radio survey obtained at 1400 MHz with the Australia Telescope Compact Array (ATCA) over the region covered by the ESO Slice Project (ESP) galaxy redshift survey. The survey consists of 16 radio mosaics with similar to 8 x 14 resolution and uniform sensitivity (1 sigma noise level similar to 79 mu Jy) over the whole area of the ESP redshift survey (similar to 26 sq, degrees at delta similar to -40 degrees). Here we present the catalogue derived from the ATESP survey. We detected 2960 distinct radio sources down to a flux density limit of similar to 0.5 mJy (6 sigma), 1402 being sub-mJy sources. We describe in detail the procedure followed fur the sourer! extraction and parameterization. The internal accuracy of the source parameters was tested with Monte Carlo simulations and possible systematic effects (e.g. bandwidth smearing) have been quantified.