Sulfur, Chlorine, and Argon in Planetary Nebulae. IIA: Observations of a Southern Sample

In this paper we present fully reduced and dereddened emission line strengths for a sample of 45 southern Type II planetary nebulae (PNe). The spectrophotometry for these PNe covers an extended optical/near-IR range from 3600 - 9600 Angstroms. This PN study and subsequent analysis (presented in a companion paper), together with a similar treatment for a northern PN sample, is aimed at addressing the lack of homogeneous, consistently observed, reduced, and analyzed data sets that include the near-IR [S III] lines at 9069 and 9532 Angstroms. The use of Type II objects only is intended to select disk nebulae that are uncontaminated by nucleosynthetic products of the progenitor star. Extending spectra redward to include the strong [S III] lines enables us to look for consistency between S++ abundances inferred from these lines and from the more accessible, albeit weaker, [S III] line at 6312 Angstroms.