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 8 00 14 00 resolution and uniform sensitivity (1 noise level 79 Jy) over the whole area of the ESP redshift survey ( 26 sq. degrees at 40). Here we present the catalogue derived from the ATESP survey. We detected 2960 distinct radio sources down to a flux density limit of 0: 5m Jy (6), 1402 being sub- mJy sources. We describe in detail the procedure followed for the source extraction and parameterization. The in- ternal accuracy of the source parameters was tested with Monte Carlo simulations and possible systematic eects (e.g. bandwidth smearing) have been quantied.