The ESO Imaging Survey is being carried out to help the selection of targets for the first year of operation of VLT. This paper presents some examples of possible candidates of interest, giving special emphasis to stellar populations and quasars. Using the area covered by the survey one is able to find candidate WDs and red objects likely to be associated with very low mass stars or brown dwarfs. A preliminary list is also presented for quasars. These lists and image postage stamps in all three passbands are also available in the ESO Science Archive server which allows the examination of the candidates ("http://www.eso.org/eis/''). Finding charts can also be easily extracted. Also available is the parent color sample from which these candidates have been defined. It is important to emphasize that in addition to providing these preliminary lists, the present work has been an essential part in understanding the characteristics of the color catalogs being produced and for the verification of their reliability.
Improvements in the sample selection are certainly possible. The combination of Galactic models, stellar evolution, quasar properties and an appropriate modelling of the observational errors in principle can lead to the definition of some probability function that can be better used to identify interesting objects; another way can be a direct fit to the broadband spectral emission of the objects. This is beyond the scope of this paper and since the data are publicly available, interested groups may refine the selection criteria and produce their own samples. The present results lead to samples that are of the order of 50 to 100 candidates each. The yield will only be defined by follow-up spectroscopic observations. Much larger samples will be available from the Pilot Survey to be carried out with the new Wide Field Imager at the 2.2 m telescope at La Silla.
Finally, it has been comunicated that observations performed at the
2dF of a sample of bright QSO candidates presented in this paper
resulted in an identification of 14 QSO with redshift in the range
out of 26 candidates with a success rate above
(S. Cristiani, private communication).
We thank all the people directly or indirectly involved in the ESO Imaging Survey effort. In particular, all the members of the EIS Working Group for the innumerable suggestions and constructive criticisms, the ESO Archive Group and the ST-ECF for their support. Special thanks to A. Baker and D. Clements for their contribution in the quasar search in the early stages of the EIS project. We would like to thank S. Warren for helpful comments and providing the code for the calculation of the color track for quasars for the EIS filters and I. Baraffe for providing the locus of brown dwarfs in the appropriate passbands. We would also like to thank R. Saglia, B. Boyle, M. Colles and S. Cristiani for comunicating their results before of publication. Our special thanks to the efforts of A. Renzini, VLT Programme Scientist, for his scientific input, support and dedication in making this project a success. Finally, we would like to thank ESO's Director General Riccardo Giacconi for making this effort possible in the short time available. This research has made use of the Simbad database, operated by the Centre de Données astronomiques de Strasbourg.
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