The ESO/VST Public Survey ATLAS is targeting 4500 square degrees of the Southern sky in five filters u,g,r,i,z to depths comparable to those of the SDSS. Its wide wavelength coverage, from the u to the z bands complements the VISTA VHS and VIKING Surveys in the YJHK bands. This survey is relevant for cosmology studies, but it can also be exploited for many other  branches of extragalactic and Galactic astronomy studies.

This third release provides stacked reduced images, associated source lists and the band-merged catalogue taken from the beginning of observations in August 2011, through to the end of September 2014, under ESO program id 177.A­‐3011. Basic data reduction was carried out at the Cambridge Astronomical Surveys Unit (CASU), while the band merged catalogue was produced by the Wide Field Astronomy Unit (WFAU) at Edinburgh. The passbands covered by ATLAS are the SDSS u,g,r,i,z bands reaching approximately the same depth ( r~22) as the SDSS survey in the Northern Hemisphere.  The total sky coverage of ATLAS DR3 is ~3700 square degrees. Each ATLAS tile comprises a stacked pawprint composed of two offset exposures.

Imaging and source list products can be browsed and downloaded via the Phase 3 query form, together with the catalogue tile files. Single records of the new catalogue are querable via the ESO catalogue facility query interface. More information on this data release can be found in the release description.