THE ADVANCED CAMERA FOR SURVEYS plus WIDE FIELD CAMERA 3 SURVEY FOR LYMAN LIMIT SYSTEMS. I. THE DATA

We present a set of 71 quasars observed in the near ultraviolet with the PR200L prism on the Advanced Camera for Surveys and the G280 grism on the Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) on board the Hubble Space Telescope. The quasars were selected from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey data to search for intervening Lyman limit system (LLS) absorption. The sample was subjected to the constraints that the quasars have AB magnitude g' < 18.5, quasar emission redshift 2.3 < z(em) < 2.6, and lack strong BAL or z similar or equal to z(em) absorption. The median emission redshift of the sample is <(z)over bar> = 2.403. The data were all processed using custom data reduction pipelines, and the one-dimensional spectra have sufficient signal-to-noise ratio and resolution to easily identify absorption from LLS over the redshift range 1.2 < z < 2.5. The WFC3 data presented here are the first non-calibration spectra from the G280 grism.