ESO imaging survey: infrared observations of CDF-S and HDF-S

¹ Observatoire de la Côte d'Azur, Laboratoire Cassiopée, BP 4229, 06304 Nice Cedex 4, France e-mail: LisbethFogh.Olsen@obs-nice.fr
² European Southern Observatory, Karl-Schwarzschild-Str. 2, 85748 Garching b. München, Germany
³ Dark Cosmology Centre, Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen, Juliane Maries Vej 30, 2100 Copenhagen, Denmark
⁴ Tècniques d'Avantguarda, Avda. Carlemany 75, 700 Les Escaldes, Andorra
⁵ Observatório Nacional, Rua Gen. José Cristino 77, Rio de Janeiro, R.J., Brasil
⁶ Istituto di Fisica Cosmica – CNR, Milano, Italy
⁷ Osservatorio Astronomico di Trieste, via G.B. Tiepolo 11, 31144 Trieste, Italy


Received: 16 November 2005
Accepted: 25 January 2006

Abstract

This paper presents infrared data obtained from observations carried out at the ESO 3.5 m New Technology Telescope (NTT) of the Hubble Deep Field South (HDF-S) and the Chandra Deep Field South (CDF-S). These data were taken as part of the ESO Imaging Survey (EIS) program, a public survey conducted by ESO to promote follow-up observations with the VLT. In the HDF-S field the infrared observations cover an area of ~53 square arcmin, encompassing the HST WFPC2 and STIS fields, in the JHK_s passbands. The seeing measured in the final stacked images ranges from 079 to 122 and the median limiting magnitudes (AB system, 2'' aperture, 5σ detection limit) are , and  mag. Less complete data are also available in JK_s for the adjacent HST NICMOS field. For CDF-S, the infrared observations cover a total area of ~100 square arcmin, reaching median limiting magnitudes (as defined above) of and  mag. For one CDF-S field H band data are also available. This paper describes the observations and presents the results of new reductions carried out entirely through the un-supervised, high-throughput EIS Data Reduction System and its associated EIS/MVM C++-based image processing library developed, over the past 5 years, by the EIS project and now publicly available. The paper also presents source catalogs extracted from the final co-added images which are used to evaluate the scientific quality of the survey products, and hence the performance of the software. This is done comparing the results obtained in the present work with those obtained by other authors from independent data and/or reductions carried out with different software packages and techniques. The final science-grade catalogs together with the astrometrically and photometrically calibrated co-added images are available at CDS.