New Data Release of VVV Photometric Catalogues via the ESO Science Archive Facility

Published: 21 Aug 2015

New Data Release of VVV Photometric Catalogues via the ESO Science Archive Facility

VVV belongs to the suite of six public surveys being conducted at ESO's Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy (VISTA). The VISTA Variables in the Via Lactea Survey (VVV) is a wide area (562 sq.degrees), near-infrared, multi-epoch imaging survey of the Milky Way bulge and disk. The initial survey in the five broadband filters Z, Y, J, H, Ks is followed by extensive multi-epoch observations in the Ks band.

The observations carried out up to 30 September 2011 with all the approved data from CASU v1.3 pipeline reduction are now complemented by three high-level photometric catalogues which therefore, supersede the previously released catalogues.

The five-band photometric catalogue records object coordinates, fluxes, color indices as well as associated quality information. In total, the catalogues contain 418,562,470 sources. All duplicates arising from the overlaps between adjacent tiles have been removed, leaving only primary detections.

Multi-epoch Ks band photometry of the sources is provided in a separate catalogue consisting of 2,561,652,334 flux measurements from 379,558,809 sources.

Sources classified as variable are recorded in a third catalogue, which contains mean magnitude, photometric amplitudes and probability of variability. In total, the catalogues of variable stars contain 13,266,759 sources.

The data are fully searchable and accessible (the entire data set or user-defined subsets) from ESO's catalogue facility query interface. Please use your personal ESO user portal credentials for login.