The VISTA Hemisphere Survey (VHS, ESO Programme ID: 79.A-2010, PI R. McMahon) is a wide area - multi band - near infrared survey, which when combined with other VISTA public surveys, will result in the coverage of the whole southern celestial hemisphere (Declination < 0; 20,000 deg²), to a depth 30 times fainter than 2MASS/DENIS in at least two filters (J and Ks), with a minimum exposure time of 60 seconds per filter and a median 5*sigma point source depth of AB = 20.8 and 20.0 in J and Ks filters respectively.

This fifth data release contains a multi-band source catalogue made of 11370 catalogue tiles obtained from Y, J, H and Ks band observations taken over a 8 year period, from the start of the survey in November 2009 to the end of March 2017. There are a total of 1,374,207,485 sources including sources detected in a single waveband. The total sky coverage in at least one waveband is 16,730 deg2. In addition to the multi-band catalogue, DR5 contains the first public ESO release of pawprints, tiles, weight maps and single band source lists for observations obtained in the date range from October 2015 to March 2017. This data release also includes image products of observations taken from April 2015 to September 2015, which were previously released in data release DR4, and are now reprocessed with a more recent version of the CASU pipeline software (version 1.5). More information about the release content can be found in the associated documentation.

The catalog can be queried as a whole via the query interface; data can be browsed and retrieved through the Science Portal or programmatically.