We present a sample of 1777 bright ( 9 < B < 14 ) metal-poor candidates selected from the Hamburg/ESO Survey ( HES ) .
Despite saturation effects present in the red portion of the HES objective-prism spectra , the data were recoverable and quantitative selection criteria could be applied to select the sample .
Analyses of medium-resolution ( \sim 2 Å ) follow-up spectroscopy of the entire sample , obtained with several 2 to 4 m class telescopes , yielded 145 new metal-poor stars with metallicity \mbox { [ Fe / H ] } < -2.0 , of which 79 have \mbox { [ Fe / H ] } < -2.5 , and 17 have \mbox { [ Fe / H ] } < -3.0 .
We also obtained C/Fe estimates for all these stars .
From this , we find a frequency of C-enhanced ( \mbox { [ C / Fe ] } > 1.0 ) metal-poor ( \mbox { [ Fe / H ] } < -2.0 ) giants of 9 \% \pm 2 \% , which is lower than previously reported .
However , the frequency raises to similar ( > 20 \% ) and higher values with increasing distance from the Galactic plane .
Although the numbers of stars at low metallicity are falling rapidly at the lowest metallicities , there is evidence that the fraction of carbon-enhanced metal-poor stars is increasing rapidly as a function of declining metallicity .
For \sim 60 objects , high-resolution data have already been obtained ; one of these , HE 1327 - 2326 , is the new record holder for the most iron-deficient star known .