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Description
This catalogue is the latest incremental release of the DENIS project. It consists of a set of 355,220,325 point sources detected by the DENIS survey in 3662 strips (covering each 30 degrees in declination and 12 arcmin in right ascension). The data in this release cover approximately 16700 square degrees of the Southern sky. Multiple detections of single point sources have been merged in image overlaps within individual strips, but sources can have multiple detections in overlaping strips. DENIS is the only astronomical survey of the Southern sky made in two near-infrared bands (J at 1.25{mu}m, and K_s_ at 2.15{mu}m) and one optical band (Gunn-i at 0.82{mu}m), with limiting magnitudes 16.5, 14 and 18.5, respectively. Saturation magnitudes are K_s_=6, J=7.5 and Gunn-i=9.8mag. It was conducted by a European consortium, using the 1m telescope at ESO, La Silla (Chile). The DENIS instrument is made up of a 3-channel camera built of commercially available detector arrays by the Observatoire de Paris and with major contributions from other European Institutes, notably: the IAS in Frascati, the Observatoire de Grenoble, the University of Innsbruck, the Observatoire de Lyon, and the IAC in Tenerife. The survey is carried out by observing strips of 30{deg} in declination and 12arcminutes in Right Ascension with an overlap of 2 arcminutes between consecutive strips. The survey started at the end of 1995 and has been completed up to 97% in 2001. The data have been reduced at the Institut d'Astrophysique de Paris and Observatoire de Paris. The position of a general extracted point source is provided with an accuracy better than 1arcsec and its magnitude to better than 0.1 mag. The Centre de Donnees Astronomiques de Strasbourg (CDS) is releasing the final databases and provides access of the processed and calibrated data to the worldwide community. The principal investigator of the DENIS project is N. Epchtein (Observatoire de la Cote d'Azur); the Co-PI in charge of data processing is G. Simon (observatoire de Paris); J. Borsenberger and B. de Batz, with the help of F. Tanguy, S. Begon and P. Texier, processed the data and implemented the working data base at PDAC; S. Derriere is in charge of the data release at CDS. Scientists and engineers from seven European countries and from Brazil are involved in the data qualification and analysis.
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