Red supergiants in the southern Milky Way. I - Search and classification techniques A detailed description of a continuing survey for distant, coolsupergiants near the Galactic plane in the southern hemisphere ispresented. Candidate stars are found on near-IR objective-prism plates,and confirming observations are made with near-IR narrowband photometryand medium-resolution CCD spectroscopy. The fluxes of 36 southern andequatorial standard stars for the eight-color narrowband system aregiven. The way in which stars are classified in temperature andluminosity type, and the way the photometry is used to derive distancesand reddening are shown. Plate centers of the near-IR survey, propertiesof interference filters, fluxes of faint standard stars, and extinctioncoefficients for Cerro Tobolo are presented.
