VVV belongs to the suite of six public surveys being conducted at ESO’s Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy (VISTA). The VISTA Variables in the Via Lactea Survey (VVV) is a wide area (562 sq.degrees), near-infrared, multi-epoch imaging survey of the Milky Way bulge and disk. The initial survey in the five broadband filters Z, Y, J, H, Ks is followed by extensive multi-epoch observations in the Ks band.

The first VVV data release, which is based on observations carried out until 1 October 2010, actually covers 404 square degrees of the Galactic disk and the bulge region and consists of 208 million sources (including duplicates). The previously announced release of astrometrically and photometrically calibrated mosaiced and co-added images, weight maps and associated single band source lists (DR1) is now complemented by three high-level photometric catalogues. The five-band photometric catalogue records object coordinates, fluxes, color indices as well as associated quality information, in total 95 parameters per object with a total data volume exceeding 81 GB. Multi-epoch Ks band photometry of these sources is provided in a separate catalogue consisting of more than 600 million individual measurements with a data volume over 36 GB. More than 6.7 million sources classified as variable are recorded in a third catalogue, which contains mean magnitude, photometric amplitudes and probability of variability with a data volume of 320 MB.

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 VVV public catalogue releases, the ESO community benefits from joint efforts by ESO, the VVV public survey team, led by D. Minniti (P.I.), and their collaborators.