The VLT Survey Telescope (VST) at Paranal is now owned and managed by INAF which processes the data and releases them via the ESO Archive. The imaging data included in this DR1 are obtained using the wide-field camera OmegaCAM in the filters: u, g, r, i, z, H_α. They span a wide range of celestial objects, from distant galaxy clusters to nearby galaxies and star clusters and have been taken as part of the following observing projects:

• "VST Early-type Galaxy Survey" (VEGAS, PI E. Iodice): deep multi-band (u,g,r,i) images of early-type galaxies in different environments to explore the structure of galaxies down to the faintest surface brightness levels
• "VST Optical Data to Advance SKA Precursors Science" (VST_SKA, PI N. Napolitano): provides crucial optical data that complements and enhances the scientific goals of precursor projects to the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) radio telescope on ELAIS-S1 field.
• "Pre-supernova outbursts in Galactic Red Supergiants: predicting the next Galactic SN event" (GALRSG, PI F. Bocchino): monitoring program of the red supergiants in the Milky Way to predict potential supernova events. It aims to characterise the multi-color light curves of a sample of RSGs in the Scutum-Crux region to detect late-stage outbursts and to compare them with the recent models of the final phases of low-mass RSGs before SN explosion.
• "Stellar Explosions and their Evolution In Nearby Galaxies" (SEEING ,PI L. Izzo): Detection of classical novae in nearby galaxies,  with the goal to determine their explosion rate.
• "Search for SN explosions from Pop III analogs in the Local Universe" (SN, PI M. Della Valle): Search for “Pop III SN-like” events in relatively nearby Universe (z < 1), preparing for future observations with LSST and JWST.
• "Galaxy Assembly as a function of Mass and Environment with VST" (VST-GAME, PI A. Mercurio): deep and wide observations of six massive galaxy clusters at 0.2 < z < 0.6. DR1 contains the r and i band images of the RXJ2248 cluster (AS1063). The data are part of a multi-band survey that includes complementary data from other instruments, among which NIRCAM@VISTA in the J, Y, and Ks bands.

The data has been processed using advanced pipelines like Astro-WISE and VST-Tube, ensuring high-quality calibration and reduction. Additional information can be found in the accompanying documentation.

The fully reduced and stacked images, including their associated weight maps are available from the ESO Archive Science Portal or via Table Access Protocol. The DOI assigned to the OMEGACAM_INAF data collection is 10.18727/archive/98.

New reduced data are going to be released indicatively twice a year. New data will be added to complete the released projects and also new projects will be released.