Astron. Astrophys. Suppl. Ser. 144, 235-245

The DENIS Point Source Catalogue towards the Magellanic Clouds

M.-R. Cioni¹ - C. Loup² - H.J. Habing¹ - P. Fouqué^6,3 - E. Bertin² - E. Deul¹ - D. Egret¹⁴ - C. Alard¹⁵ - B. de Batz³ - J. Borsenberger² - M. Dennefeld² - N. Epchtein⁴ - T. Forveille⁵ - F. Garzón⁷ - J. Hron⁸ - S. Kimeswenger⁹ - F. Lacombe³ - T. Le Bertre¹⁵ - G.A. Mamon^2,3 - A. Omont² - G. Paturel¹⁰ - P. Persi¹¹ - A. Robin¹² - D. Rouan³ - G. Simon¹⁵ - D. Tiphène³ - I. Vauglin¹⁰ - S. Wagner¹³

Send offprint request: M-R. Cioni

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

Received December 6, 1999; accepted March 9, 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 $19.87\times 16$ square degrees centered on $(\alpha,\delta)=(5^{\rm h}27^{\rm m}20^{\rm s}$, $-69\hbox{$^\circ$ }00\hbox{$^\prime$ }00\hbox{$^{\prime\prime}$ })$ for the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) and $14.7\times 10$ square degrees centered on $(\alpha,\delta)=(1^{\rm h}02^{\rm m}40^{\rm s}$, $-73\hbox{$^\circ$ }00\hbox{$^\prime$ }00\hbox{$^{\prime\prime}$ })$ for the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) at the epoch J2000. It contains about $1\,300\,000$ sources towards the LMC and $300\,000$ sources towards the SMC each detected in at least 2 of the 3 photometric bands involved in the survey (I, J, $K_{\rm s}$). $70\%$ 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.

Key words: catalogs -- surveys -- galaxies: magellanic clouds -- galaxies: photometry -- galaxies: stellar content -- infrared: stars