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 second data release refers to five new images for VMC tiles (tiles LMC 5_5, 6_4, 8_3, and tiles SMC 3_3, 3_5) and the two re-processed tiles LMC 6_6 and 8_8 (covering 7.5 deg² in the LMC and 3 deg² in SMC). It 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. In addition, a new catalogue of eclipsing binaries in the LMC tiles contains Ks amplitudes together with periods from optical catalogues (OGLE-III, EROS-2) for each star. The catalogues were extracted from the reduced images which have been released under VMC Data Release 3 in October 2014.

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