VISTA Hemisphere Survey - Data Release 1

Provided by: R. McMahon, M. Banerji, N. Lodieu for the VHS Collaboration

Release Date: 17.10.2011

The aim of the VISTA Hemisphere Survey (VHS) is to carry out a near Infra-Red survey, which when combined with other VISTA Public Surveys will result in coverage of the whole southern celestial hemisphere (~20,000 deg2) to a depth 30 times fainter than 2MASS/DENIS in at least two wavebands (J and Ks), with an exposure time of 60 seconds per waveband to produce median 5σ point source (Vega) limits of J = 20.2 and Ks = 18.1. In the South Galactic Cap, ~5000 deg2 will be imaged deeper with an exposure time of 120 seconds and also including the H band producing median 5σ point limits of: J = 20.6; H = 19.8; Ks = 18.5. In this 5000 deg2 region of sky deep multi-band optical (grizY) imaging data will be provided by the Dark Energy Survey (DES). The remainder of the high galactic latitude (|b|>30°) sky will be imaged in YJHK for 60 sec per band to be combined with ugriz waveband observations from the VST ATLAS survey.

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Sky coverage of the VHS survey in Data Release 1. The thick green lines show the Dark Energy Survey footprint. The solid rectangles show the nominal footprint of the VIKING survey which is avoided by VHS. The solid curved lines show the galactic latitude= -5,5 and the bulge region of the VVV survey.

The VHS survey data in this release, which includes observations up to the 30 Sep 2010, consists of three survey components that have different OB structures: VHS DES with 120 secs in J, H and Ks, VHS GPS with 60 secs in J and Ks, and VHS ATLAS with 60 secs in Y, J, H and Ks.

This data release consists of 27597 pawprint and 4560 tiles images and catalogues (i.e. source lists) derived from both the pawprint and tile images.

For more information please refer to the full data release description [PDF format].

Data retrieval

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Acknowledgements

Users of data products provided in this release are required to acknowledge the source of the data with an appropriate citation in their publications in the form:

Based on data products from observations made with ESO Telescopes at the La Silla or Paranal Observatories under ESO programme ID 179.A-2010.