The VISTA Magellanic Survey (VMC) тАУ one of the six public surveys current at the Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy (VISTA) тАУ aims at determining the spatially resolved star formation history and 3D geometry of the Magellanic system. The VMC survey is designed to reach stars below the oldest main-sequence turn-off and the multi-epoch strategy enables accurate Ks mean magnitudes for variable stars, e.g. RR Lyrae stars and Cepheids, to be measured. Catalogues from some of the deep co-added survey images have now been released.
Release of Photometric Catalogue Data Resulting from the VISTA Magellanic Survey
Published: 11 Apr 2014
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), about 3.5 square degrees 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 and 12 epochs in Ks, 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 accessible from the ESO catalogue facility query interface, each accompanied by a comprehensive description; see for example, the description of the YJKs master catalogue.