While there have been many surveys for luminous, blue galactic stars and their numbers can be considered somewhat complete, such is not the case for red supergiants (see e.g. Humphreys and McElroy 1984). One result of this incompleteness is that the ratios B/R and WR/R, often used as diagnostics for evolutionary models of massive stars and the variation of the ratios with galactocentric distance, are not well known for the Galaxy. In an attempt to improve the statistics, the first author began an objective-prism survey within 6 deg of the southern galactic plane using I-N plates. The dispersion is 3400 A/mm at the A-band, and the spectra cover the range 6800–8800 A; the deepest plates reach ir mag ∼13. The detection of possible M supergiants on such plates was first discussed by Nassau, et al. (1954) and depends on the presence of TiO at 7054 A and a spectrum sharply tapered to the blue. For supergiants, this shape results from integration of interstellar dust over a long path-length, but any sample of red stars with tapered spectra contains M giants in heavily-obscured regions and S stars; thus follow-up observations of the candidate stars are necessary.