Third public release of the Kilo-Degree Survey (KiDS) now available

Published: 10 Oct 2016

KiDS is one of the ESO Public Surveys carried out with OmegaCAM at the VST. Once complete, it will observe 1500 square degrees in four filters (u, g, r, i). Born to be a weak lensing shear tomography survey, it will also map the large-scale matter distribution in the universe and constrain the equation of state of Dark Energy. Its secondary science cases include galaxy evolution to Milky Way structure and from the detection of white dwarfs to high-redshift quasars.

Calibrated co-added images together with their weight maps, masks and single bands source lists are provided for additional 292 survey pointings, with respect to the previous release. The sky area covered is ~320 square degrees, including all the observations executed till October 2015. The multi-band source catalogue, available via the catalogue query interface, lists 49 million sources over the whole area covered, i.e. ~470 squared degrees observed. The current catalog is based on homogenized photometry, provides colour information and photometric redshifts for these sources.

Extensive information on KiDS DR3 is available in the release notes.