A Hubble Space Telescope Survey of Extended [oiii]λ5007å Emission in a Far-infrared Selected Sample of Seyfert Galaxies: Observations

We present a Hubble Space Telescope (HST) survey of extended [OIII] emission for a sample of 60 Seyfert galaxies (22 Seyfert 1’s and 38 Seyfert 2’s), selected based on their far infrared properties. The observations for 42 of these galaxies were done in a snapshot survey with WFPC2. The remaining 18 were obtained from the HST archive, most of which were observed with the same configuration. These observations cover 68% of the objects in the sample defined by Kinney et al. (2000), and create a valuable dataset for the study of the Narrow Line Region (NLR) properties of Seyfert galaxies. In this paper, we present the details of the observations, reductions, and measurements. We also discuss the extended structure of individual sources, and the relation of this emission to the radio and host galaxy morphology. We also address how representative the subsample of [O III]-imaged galaxies is of the entire sample, and possible selection effects that may affect this comparison of the properties of Seyfert 1 and Seyfert 2 galaxies. Subject headings: galaxies:active – galaxies:Seyfert – galaxies:structure – galaxies:emission lines – galaxies:nuclei – surveys