1 Introduction

We have conducted an extensive near infrared (NIR) survey of the fields around a large sample of Herbig AeBe stars with the aim of detecting and characterizing the properties of groups of young stars around intermediate mass pre-main sequence stars. We were primarily motivated by the expectation that at NIR wavelenghts, and especially at K band, the reduced extinction would enable the detection of embedded young stars born in the same environment of (and possibly coeval with) the intermediate mass star. Existing NIR surveys are either focused at the detection of close,  AU, companions (Leinert et al. 1997; Pirzkal et al. 1997) or are restricted to a limited sample of objects and cover smaller fields than our survey (Li et al. 1994; Hillenbrand 1995).

In Testi et al. (1997; Paper I) we have presented the first results obtained for a subsample of 19 objects. In the present paper we present an atlas of all the fields observed so far (45 total), which forms the database for our study of the clustering around young, intermediate-mass stars (Testi et al. 1998). In Sects. 2 and 3 we describe the sample selection, the observations and data reduction. The results of the observations are presented in Sect. 4, whereas notes on individual sources are given in Sect. 5. We summarize our results in Sect. 6.