Second VISTA Public Survey Data Release
The ESO Science Archive Facility provides access to new data products resulting from the VISTA public survey projects. Largely complementing the first release of VISTA public survey data products from 2011, the VISTA public surveys have returned 6.2 TB of reduced data products, which can be queried for and downloaded by the international community via dedicated query interfaces at the ESO Science Archive Facility.
The survey programmes on the near-infrared 4-metre Visual and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy (VISTA) are a suite of well-coordinated and challenging scientific projects that range from pencil beam deep observations of extragalactic fields - to whole hemisphere surveys. A summary of their scientific goals and observing strategies is available at the following URL:
http://www.eso.org/sci/observing/PublicSurveys/sciencePublicSurveys.html
The current data release covers mostly the period from October 2010 to September 2011 and becomes now publicly available to the community for scientific investigation. It primarily consists of astrometrically and photometrically calibrated mosaiced and coadded images, covering each 1.5 deg2 of sky, their weight maps, and associated single band source lists, in the different bands of each survey projects.
The data products from the first VISTA public release can be queried for and retrieved at this URL:
http://archive.eso.org/wdb/wdb/eso/phase3_vircam/form
Summary table with the survey project name, release content, sky coverage and the NIR filters:
| Survey Project | Release content | Sky coverage (sq.deg) | NIR filters |
| VVV | 5-band NIR map of the bulge and plane regions (completion); first two semesters of variability campaign: up to 61 epochs in Ks |
520 | ZYJHKs |
| VHS | 5074 tiles VHS DES: 120 secs in JHK VHS ATLAS: 60 secs in YJHKs VHS GPS: 60 secs in JKs |
ca. 2200 | YJHKs |
| VIKING | 151 tiles in GAMA09/12/14, SGP stripe, and CFHLS-W1 regions, with integration times between 300 and 480 sec per source |
226 | ZYJHKs |
| VMC | 2 pointings in the LMC, one overlapping with 30 Doradus and the other with the South Ecliptic Pole including revised deep stacked images and single-OB images |
3.0 | YJKs |
Each data release is accompanied by an accurate release description which provides information on the area coverage, the content of the release (i.e. bands, depth, etc) and additional details on the calibrations and results from quality control. They support the scientific use of the products by the international community beyond the scientific goals identified by the survey teams. These release descriptions are available at this URL:
http://www.eso.org/sci/observing/phase3/data_releases.html
As stated in the ESO council document on the VLT/VLTI science operation policies, the ESO Science Archive Facility is the collection point for the survey products and the primary point of publication/availability of these products to the ESO community. The mechanism set in place by the Phase 3 process for the reception, validation, and publication of data products from public survey projects ensures a high homogeneity and uniform standards for the data products accessible via the ESO archive query interface.
By accessing the VISTA public releases, the ESO community benefits from joint efforts by ESO, the PIs of the VISTA public survey projects and their collaborators, including the data centers at CASU, (Cambridge, http://casu.ast.cam.ac.uk ) and WFAU (Edinburgh, http://horus.roe.ac.uk/vsa/index.html ).