DEep Near-Infrared Survey of the southern sky
DENIS is a project to survey the all-southern sky simultaneously in three
wavelength bands (Gunn-i 0.82 µm; J, 1.25 µm; and Ks,
2.15 µm) with limiting magnitudes 18.5, 16.5 and 14.0, respectively.
The observations are performed with the 1m-ESO telescope at 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° in
declination and 12 arcminutes in Right Ascension with an overlap
of 2 arcminutes between consecutive strips.
The observations
started at the end of 1995 and have been completed on Sept. 9, 2001. The data are reduced
in two consecutive steps, the image processing and source extraction,
which are performed at the Institut d'Astrophysique de Paris. The position of a
general extracted point source is provided with an accuracy better than
1 arcsec and its magnitude to better than 0.1 mag. The data will be
made publicly available as soon as possible after completing the
data reduction. The Centre de Données Astronomiques de Strasbourg
(CDS) is implementing the final databases and will eventually
provide access of the processed and calibrated data to the worldwide community.
It is expected that DENIS data will be of
great help in determining projects for the VLT and future space
missions.
The principal investigator of the DENIS project is Nicolas Epchtein
(Observatoire de la Côte d'Azur); scientists and engineers
from seven European countries and from Brazil are involved.
The scientific exploitation of the already existing data is carried
out by several dedicated groups.
These special programs allow a continuous monitoring of the quality of the
survey data and thus give feedback to the project.