VEGAS is a deep multi-band (u'g'r'i') imaging survey of bright (M_B<-21mag) early-type galaxies in the local volume within 54 Mpc/h carried out with OmegaCam on the VLT Survey Telescope (VST, Capaccioli et al., 2005; see also the VEGAS website). Observations are based on the VST Guaranteed Time Observation assigned to the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics under programme ID runs: 089.B-0607(A), 090.B-0414(B,D), 091.B-0614(A), 092.B-0623(B,C,D), 094.B-0496(D), 095.B-0779(A), 096.B-0582(B), 097.B-0806(A,B), 098.B-0208(A), 099.B-0560(A), and 0100.B-0168(A).

This first date release publishes multi-band data for 10 fields, each of them covering a main galaxy and its close environment out to about 8-10 effective radii. The wide field of view, the long integration (ranging from 0.5 to 6.5 hours), and the high angular resolution of 0.21'' pixel^-1 delivered by VST allow the light distribution to be mapped down to a surface brightness level of ~29 mag arcsec^-2 in g'-band.

These 23 science images (and corresponding weight maps) covering an area of ~42 deg² are now available to the ESO community via the ESO Science Portal and programmatically. The total data volume is ~30Gb.

More information about the release content can be found in the accompanying documentation.