Abstract
In 2000, we started the program ``Building the Bridge between Damped Lyman- alpha Absorbers and Lyman-Break Galaxies: Ly alpha Selection of Galaxies'' at the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (VLT). This project is an attempt to use the Ly alpha selection of high-redshift galaxies to bridge the gap between absorption- and emission-line selected galaxies by creating a large database of z ~ 3 galaxies belonging to the abundant population of faint ( R > 25.5) galaxies associated to Damped Ly alpha Absorbers (DLAs). Here we present the first part of our program, namely results from a deep Ly alpha study of the field of the z = 2.85 DLA toward the quasar Q 2138-4427.
