The VISTA Magellanic Survey (VMC) - one of the six public surveys being conducted at ESO’s Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy - aims at the determination of the spatially resolved star formation history and the three-dimensional geometry of the Magellanic system. The sensitivity is designed to reach sources below the oldest main-sequence turn off point of the stellar population and the multi-epochs to measure accurate Ks mean magnitudes for pulsating variable stars, e.g. RR Lyrae stars and Cepheids.

This data release, covering the survey tiles LMC 6_6 (including the 30 Doradus star forming region) and LMC 8_8 (including the South Ecliptic Pole region), ca. 3.5 deg² in total, consists of the band-merged YJKs photometric catalogue based on the deep co-added survey images of at least three epochs in Y and J filters and twelve epochs in Ks filter, the multi-epoch photometry in each of the three bands and the catalogue of known Cepheids including also periods and modes of pulsation from optical-band data. The catalogues were extracted from the reduced images which have been released under VMC Data Release 2 in June 2013.

The new catalogue data are conjointly accessible from ESO’s catalogue facility query interface^(*), each one accompanied by a comprehensive release description.

^{(*)Note: ESO User Portal authentication required.}