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.
|