The DENIS Point Source Catalogue towards the Magellanic Clouds ^*,**

¹ Leiden Observatory, Postbus 9513, NL–2300 RA Leiden, The Netherlands
² Institut d'Astrophysique de Paris, CNRS UPR 341, 98 bis Bd. Arago, F–75014 Paris, France
³ European Southern Observatory, Casilla 19001, Santiago 19, Chile
⁴ Observatoire de Paris, 5 place J. Janssen, F–92195 Meudon Cedex, France
⁵ CDS, Observatoire Astronomique de Strasbourg, CNRS UMR 7550, 11 rue de l'Université, F–67000 Strasbourg, France
⁶ Observatoire de Paris, 65 avenue de l'Observatoire, F–75014 Paris, France
⁷ Observatoire de la Côte d'Azur, Département Fresnel, F–06304 Nice Cedex 04, France
⁸ Observatoire de Grenoble, 414 rue de la Piscine, Domaine Universitaire de Saint Martin d'Hères, F-38041 Grenoble, France
⁹ Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias, E–38200 La Laguna, Tenerife, Spain
¹⁰ Institut für Astronomie der Universität Wien, Turkenschanzstrasse 17, A–1180 Wien, Austria
¹¹ Institut für Astrophysik, Innsbruck University, A–6020 Innsbruck, Austria
¹² CRAL–Observatoire de Lyon, F–69561 Saint–Genis Laval Cedex, France
¹³ Istituto di Astrofisica Spaziale, Area di Ricerca, Roma–Tor–Vergata I–00044, Italy
¹⁴ Observatoire de Besançon, BP. 1615, F-25010 Besançon Cedex, France
¹⁵ Landessternwarte Heidelberg, Königstuhl, D–69117 Heidelberg, Germany

Send offprint request to: M-R. Cioni

Received: 6 December 1999
Accepted: 9 March 2000

Abstract

We have compiled the near infrared Point Source Catalogue (PSC) towards the Magellanic Clouds (MCs) extracted from the data obtained with the Deep Near Infrared Survey of the Southern Sky – DENIS (Epchtein et al. 1997). The catalogue covers an area of of square degrees centered on , for the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) and square degrees centered on , for the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) at the epoch J2000. It contains about sources towards the LMC and sources towards the SMC each detected in at least 2 of the 3 photometric bands involved in the survey (I, J, K_s). of the detected sources are true members of the Magellanic Clouds, respectively and consist mainly of red giants, asymptotic giant branch stars and super-giants. The observations have all been made with the same instrument and the data have been calibrated and reduced uniformly. The catalogue provides a homogeneous set of photometric data.