VIKING belongs to the suite of six public surveys being conducted at ESO’s Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy (VISTA). The VISTA Kilo-degree Infrared Galaxy Survey (VIKING) is a wide area (eventually ~1500 sq.degrees), intermediate-depth (5-sigma detection limit J~21 on Vega system) near-infrared imaging survey, in the five broadband filters Z, Y, J, H, Ks.

The first VIKING data release, which is based on observations carried out until mid February 2011, covers 226 square degrees in all five VIKING filters and consists of 14.7 million sources (including low-reliability single-band detections). The previously announced release of astrometrically and photometrically calibrated mosaiced and co-added images (each 1.5 square degrees), weight maps and associated single band source lists is now complemented by the VIKING five-band photometric catalogue recording object coordinates, fluxes, color indices, morphologic parameters as well as associated quality information, in total over 160 parameters per object with a total data volume over 9 gigabytes. The data are fully searchable and accessible – the entire data set or user-defined subsets – from ESO’s catalogue facility query interface. Please use your personal ESO user portal credentials for login.

By accessing the first VIKING public catalogue release, the ESO community benefits from joint efforts by ESO, the VIKING public survey team, led by A. Edge (P.I.), and their collaborators.