The HI Parkes deep zone of avoidance survey

The 64-m Parkes telescope, equipped with the 21-cm multibeam receiver, has completed a sensitive survey (typically 6 mJy beam(-1) rms) for HI galaxies in the Zone of Avoidance (ZoA) accessible to the telescope, 196 degrees <= l <= 52 degrees, and vertical bar b vertical bar <= 5 degrees. While galaxy candidate inspection is not yet quite complete, and final number not yet determined, the survey has yielded about 1000 galaxies. The data, in the form of three-dimensional datacubes, have been inspected by eye, and candidate lists assembled, and about half have now been checked for reality, and accepted into the final catalogue. The distributions on the sky and in redshift space are presented, showing galaxies belonging to previously-known structures, and newly-discovered features. Of the 469 confirmed HI galaxies, 191 have a NIR source within 6' in the 2MASS Extended Source Catalogue, but the incidence of NIR counterparts is a strong function of longitude: in the low obscuration, low stellar surface density Puppis region, 131 of the 186 HI galaxies have 2MASS counterparts (70 per cent), while in the Galactic bulge region, only 6 of the 155 HI detections have a 2MASS extended source coincident (4 per cent). This is attributable to the HI survey's ability to detect galaxies even in regions of high foreground stellar surface density.