A reverberation-mapping program on NGC 4395, the least luminous known Seyfert 1 galaxy, undertaken with the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph on the Hubble Space Telescope yields a measurement of the mass of the central black hole M BH ¼ (3:6 AE 1:1) ; 10 5 M. The observations consist of two visits of five orbits each, in 2004 April and July. During each of these visits, the UV continuum varied by at least 10% (rms), and only C iv k1549 showed corresponding variations large enough to reliably determine the emission-line lag, which was measured to be of order 1 hr for both visits. The size of the C iv-emitting region is about a factor of 3 smaller than expected if the slope of the broad-line region radius-luminosity relationship is identical to that for the H emission line. NGC 4395 is underluminous even for its small black hole mass; the Eddington ratio of $1:2 ; 10 À3 is lower than that of any other active galactic nucleus for which a black hole mass measurement has been made by emission-line reverberation.

In this first paper in a series we present 1298 low-redshift (z 0.2) optical spectra of 582 Type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia) observed from 1989 through 2008 as part of the Berkeley SN Ia Program (BSNIP). 584 spectra of 199 SNe Ia have well-calibrated light curves with measured distance moduli, and many of the spectra have been corrected for host-galaxy contamination. Most of the data were obtained using the Kast double spectrograph mounted on the Shane 3 m telescope at Lick Observatory and have a typical wavelength range of 3300-10,400Å, roughly twice as wide as spectra from most previously published datasets. We present our observing and reduction procedures, and we describe the resulting SN Database (SNDB), which will be an online, public, searchable database containing all of our fully reduced spectra and companion photometry. In addition, we discuss our spectral classification scheme (using the SuperNova IDentification code, SNID; Blondin & Tonry 2007), utilising our newly constructed set of SNID spectral templates. These templates allow us to accurately classify our entire dataset, and by doing so we are able to reclassify a handful of objects as bona fide SNe Ia and a few other objects as members of some of the peculiar SN Ia subtypes. In fact, our dataset includes spectra of nearly 90 spectroscopically peculiar SNe Ia. We also present spectroscopic host-galaxy redshifts of some SNe Ia where these values were previously unknown. The sheer size of the BSNIP dataset and the consistency of our observation and reduction methods makes this sample unique among all other published SN Ia datasets and is complementary in many ways to the large, low-redshift SN Ia spectra presented by Matheson et al. 2008 andBlondin et al. 2012. In other BSNIP papers in this series, we use these data to examine the relationships between spectroscopic characteristics and various observables such as photometric and host-galaxy properties.

We analyse the Fundamental Plane projections of elliptical galaxies as a function of luminosity, using a sample of ≈80 000 galaxies drawn from Data Release 4 (DR4) of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). We separate brightest cluster galaxies (BCGs) from our main sample and reanalyse their photometry due to a problem with the default pipeline sky subtraction for BCGs. The observables we consider are effective radius (R e ), velocity dispersion (σ ), dynamical mass (M dyn ∝ R e σ 2 ), effective density (σ 2 /R 2 e ) and effective surface brightness (μ e ). With the exception of the L -M dyn correlation, we find evidence of variations in the slope (i.e. the power-law index) of the Fundamental Plane projections with luminosity for our normal elliptical galaxy population. In particular, the radius-luminosity and Faber-Jackson relations are steeper at high luminosity relative to low luminosity, and the more luminous ellipticals become progressively less dense and have lower surface brightnesses than lower luminosity ellipticals. These variations can be understood as arising from differing formation histories, with more luminous galaxies having less dissipation. Data from the literature and our reanalysis of BCGs show that BCGs have radius-luminosity and Faber-Jackson relations steeper than the brightest non-BCG ellipticals in our sample, consistent with significant growth of BCGs via dissipationless mergers. The variations in slope we find in the Faber-Jackson relation of non-BCGs are qualitatively similar to that reported in the black hole mass-velocity dispersion (M BH -σ ) correlation. This similarity is consistent with a roughly constant value of M BH /M over a wide range of early-type galaxies, where M is the stellar mass.

Infrared echelle spectra are used to trace dynamic activity in the immediate vicinity of Class I outflow sources. The H 2 and Brγ observations presented here trace different components of these emission‐line regions; indeed, they are thought to trace the orthogonal processes of outflow and infall respectively. High‐velocity H 2 emission is detected in the extended lobes of nine outflows. In addition, complex H 2 line emission is observed within a few hundred au of nine of the outflow sources. We refer to these H 2 emission regions as ‘molecular hydrogen emission‐line’ regions, or MHELs, and compare their properties to those of forbidden emission‐line regions (FELs) observed in classical T Tauri and some Herbig AeBe stars. Like the FELs, both low‐ and high‐velocity components (LVCs and HVCs) are observed in H 2, with blueshifted velocities of the order of 5–20 and 50–150 km s−1 respectively. LVCs are more common than HVCs in MHEL regions, and like their FEL counterparts, the latter are spatially further offset from the exciting source in each case. The MHEL regions – which are in all cases preferentially blueshifted – are assumed to be associated with the base of each outflow. Brγ profiles are detected towards four of the Class I sources observed (SVS 13, IRAS 04239+2436, HH 34‐IRS and GGD 27(1)) as well as towards the T Tauri star AS 353A. These lines are all broad and symmetric, the line peaks being blueshifted by ∼30 km s−1. The profiles are typical of the permitted hydrogen line profiles observed in many T Tauri stars, and probably derive from magnetospheric accretion flows. We do not observe redshifted absorption features (inverse P‐Cygni profiles) in any of the sources, however. Nor do we detect a dependence on linewidth with inclination angle of the system to the line of sight, as is predicted by such accretion models. No Brγ is detected in the extended flow lobes. Instead, the emission is confined to the source and is spatially unresolved along each flow axis.