090220

We request 190 ks on a uniform sample of 12 optically-selected low-z radio-quiet SDSS quasars. The range of L/LEdd complement the virgul60 well-studied but potentially biased (in terms of L/LEdd) ..reverberation mapped. (RM) quasars. With both SDSS and HST spectroscopy we are able to estimate L/Ledd from 3 optical/UV-based estimators. X-ray data from Chandra enables a 4th L/LEdd estimator (alpha_ox) for the full sample of 25 objects. The 12 proposed targets lack sufficient Chandra counts to investigate the robustness of the hard X-ray spectral index Gamma as an indicator of L/LEdd. Our observations will enable intercomparison of 5 optical/UV and X-ray estimators of L/LEdd for a well-defined sample of quasars. [truncated! Please see actual data for full text]