The survey is a joint project undertaken by the European Southern Observatory (ESO) and the Uppsala Observatory to provide a systematic and homogeneous search of the ESO(B) Atlas (also known as the Quick Blue Survey). The ESO(B) Atlas, taken with the ESO 1-m Schmidt telescope at La Silla, Chile, covers 606 fields from -90 to -20 degrees of declination. The fields are similar in size and scale to those of the Palomar Observatory Sky Survey. Unsensitized IIa-O plates and a 2-mm GG385 filter were used to give a passband similar to the Johnson B color. The actual search was conducted at the Uppsala Observatory and resulted in a list of nonstellar objects including all NGC and IC galaxies between -20 and -30 degrees declination, all galaxies down to a limiting diameter of 1.0 arcmin, all disturbed galaxies as faint as possible, all star clusters in the Catalog of Star Clusters and Associations (Alter et al. 1970) and smaller and fainter clusters if recognizable and all planetary nebulae listed in the available catalogs. The catalog includes coordinates, identifications, diameters, position angles, morphological types, classifications, magnitudes, colors, and radial velocities.
The Kilo-Degree Survey (KiDS) is an optical wide-field imaging survey carried out with the VLT Survey Telescope and the OmegaCAM camera. KiDS will image 1500 square degrees in four filters (ugri), and together with its near-infrared counterpart VIKING will produce deep photometry in nine bands. Designed for weak lensing shape and photometric redshift measurements, its core science driver is mapping the large-scale matter distribution in the Universe back to a redshift of ~0.5. Secondary science cases include galaxy evolution, Milky Way structure, and the detection of high-redshift clusters and quasars.
