New data release of the Vista Magellanic Cloud Survey (VMC): YJKs imaging of the LMC and updated survey catalogues

Published: 26 Sep 2022

The ESO Public Survey project VMC, ESO program 179.B-2003, PI M. R. Cioni, targets the Magellanic Cloud system in three filters: Y, J and Ks. The main goals are the determination of the spatially resolved star formation history and study the three-dimensional geometry of the system.

This new data release DR6 provides the complete set of observations covering the Large Magellanic Cloud, ~110 deg2, taken between November 2009 and October 2018. It contains both newly released observations (61 tiles) and updated versions of the 7 LMC survey tiles previously released, reprocessed by CASU using the newer version of the pipeline v1.5 which includes improved photometric calibration.

In addition, the release provides high-level products generated from the Wide Field Astronomy Unit (WFAU): deep co-added tile images and catalogues (separately for each filter), for both individual tiles and combined, as well as photometric source catalogues covering the whole survey area: one band-merged catalogues, three multi-epoch catalogues, one per filter, one catalogue including the PSF magnitudes and one catalogue of variable sources. These catalogues can be queried conjointly via the catalogue facility or TAP.

Data can be browsed and downloaded via the Science Portal or programmatically.

More detailed information is available in the accompanying documentation.