The VISTA Extragalactic Infrared Legacy Survey (VEILS, PI: Banerji, Program ID:198.A-2005) is a deep J and Ks-band transient and wide-field survey being conducted using the VIRCAM camera with the primary goals of understanding the epoch of reionisation, the build-up of massive galaxies, and constraining the cosmological equation of state using both Type 1a supernovae and AGN dust lag measurements. The total VEILS surveyed area is 9 sq-deg of the extragalactic sky over three fields: XMM-LSS, CDFS and ELAIS-S1. The data acquisition for the VEILS survey was successfully completed in 2022 prior to the VIRCAM decommissioning.

This second data release contains pawprint images 3173 pawprints, in total 1582 in the J-band and 1591 in the Ks-band, and deep stacked pawprints, 72 in total over the 3 cosmological fields. These data products come together with associated confidence maps and single-band J and Ks source lists. lists. The release includes all images taken as part of the VEILS survey between 2016-10-22 and 2019-12-30. The DR2 release corresponds to 100% of DR1 imaging data which have been reprocessed with version 1.5 of the pipeline, plus an incremental release of single epoch observations.

The breakdown of the number of epochs per pointing and band associated with each cosmological field is available in the release description document.

The VEILS DR2 data products are available from the ESO Archive Science Portal or programmatically. More details about the release content can be found in the accompanying documentation and via the collection DOI. By accessing the VEILS DR2 products, the ESO community benefits from joint efforts by ESO, the PIs of the VISTA public survey projects and their collaborators, including CASU.