`Water In Star-forming regions with Herschel' (WISH) is a key program on the Herschel Space Observatory designed to probe the physical and chemical structure of young stellar objects using water and related molecules and to follow the water abundance from collapsing clouds to planet-forming disks. About 80 sources are targeted covering a wide range of luminosities and evolutionary stages, from cold pre-stellar cores to warm protostellar envelopes and outflows to disks around young stars. Both the HIFI and PACS instruments are used to observe a variety of lines of H2O, H218O and chemically related species. An overview of the scientific motivation and observational strategy of the program is given together with the modeling approach and analysis tools that have been developed. Initial science results are presented. These include a lack of water in cold gas at abundances that are lower than most predictions, strong water emission from shocks in protostellar environments, the importance of UV radiation in heating the gas along outflow walls across the full range of luminosities, and surprisingly widespread detection of the chemically related hydrides OH+ and H2O+ in outflows and foreground gas. Quantitative estimates of the energy budget indicate that H2O is generally not the dominant coolant in the warm dense gas associated with protostars. Very deep limits on the cold gaseous water reservoir in the outer regions of protoplanetary disks are obtained which have profound implications for our understanding of grain growth and mixing in disks.

Herschel-HIFI observations of high-J lines (up to J_u=10) of 12CO, 13CO and C18O are presented toward three deeply embedded low-mass protostars, NGC 1333 IRAS 2A, IRAS 4A, and IRAS 4B, obtained as part of the Water In Star-forming regions with Herschel (WISH) key program. The spectrally-resolved HIFI data are complemented by ground-based observations of lower-J CO and isotopologue lines. The 12CO 10-9 profiles are dominated by broad (FWHM 25-30 km s^-1) emission. Radiative transfer models are used to constrain the temperature of this shocked gas to 100-200 K. Several CO and 13CO line profiles also reveal a medium-broad component (FWHM 5-10 km s^-1), seen prominently in H2O lines. Column densities for both components are presented, providing a reference for determining abundances of other molecules in the same gas. The narrow C18O 9-8 lines probe the warmer part of the quiescent envelope. Their intensities require a jump in the CO abundance at an evaporation temperature around 25 K, thus providing new direct evidence for a CO ice evaporation zone around low-mass protostars.

MICADO is the adaptive optics imaging camera for the E-ELT. It has been designed and optimised to be mounted to the LGS-MCAO system MAORY, and will provide diffraction limited imaging over a wide (about 1 arcmin) field of view. For initial operations, it can also be used with its own simpler AO module that provides on-axis diffraction limited performance using natural guide stars. We discuss the instrument's key capabilities and expected performance, and show how the science drivers have shaped its design. We outline the technical concept, from the opto-mechanical design to operations and data processing. We describe the AO module, summarise the instrument performance, and indicate some possible future developments.

The current status of astrometry in Astro-WISE is explored. This includes the underlying mechanisms, procedures, performance, and accuracies of both the local and the global astrometric solution, as well as the improvement from the local to the global solution. Using all currently Astro-WISE processed data from the WFI instrument on the MPG/ESO 2.2m telescope (24512 frames, more than 3000 exposures), we show that the overall accuracies are consistent with and due to the precision of the USNO-A2.0 reference catalog (0.3 arcsec RMS and 1 arcsec systematic) for the local solution and are approximately 0.04 arcsec for the global solution. In addition, it is found that the precision of the underlying software (SExtractor, LDAC, SWarp) in extracting sources, applying solutions, and regridding frames to 0.200 arcsec per pixel is of the order 0.02 arcsec RMS. The performance of the local solution has a virtually 100% success rate with respect to the underlying software, a 98.0% success rate with respect to the quality of the data, and 96.4% success rate with respect to the quality of the solution. The predicted precision of any astrometric solution is identical to the actual precision, and this result is repeatable to a level of up to 0.085 arcsec RMS for the local solution and 0.074 arcsec RMS for the global solution using the extra information in a dither. Finally, the improvement of the astrometric solution from local to global shows an average increase in precision of a factor of two, from 0.10 arcsec to 0.054 arcsec, in 2-dimensional RMS.

We present our image processing system for the reduction of optical imaging data from multi-chip cameras. In the framework of the Garching Bonn Deep Survey (GaBoDS; Schirmer et al. 2003) consisting of about 20 square degrees of high-quality data from WFI@MPG/ESO 2.2m, our group developed an imaging pipeline for the homogeneous and efficient processing of this large data set. Having weak gravitational lensing as the main science driver, our algorithms are optimised to produce deep co-added mosaics from individual exposures obtained from empty field observations. However, the modular design of our pipeline allows an easy adaption to different scientific applications. Our system has already been ported to a large variety of optical instruments and its products have been used in various scientific contexts. In this paper we give a thorough description of the algorithms used and a careful evaluation of the accuracies reached. This concerns the removal of the instrumental signature, the astrometric alignment, photometric calibration and the characterisation of final co-added mosaics. In addition we give a more general overview on the image reduction process and comment on observing strategies where they have significant influence on the data quality.

In 2004, OmegaCAM will start operations on Paranal as the sole instrument on the 2.6-m VLT Survey Telescope. OmegaCAM is a huge optical CCD imaging camera: its 16k × 16k CCD pixels cover the square degree field of view of the VST almost entirely. The primary function of the VST and its instrument is to provide surveys in support of VLT science, be it in the form of large homogeneous multi-colour imaging surveys which form the basis for largescale spectroscopic follow-up work, or in its ability to find rare or extreme astronomical objects for further study.

OmegaCAM is a 16k × 16k optical camera currently built for ESO’s VLT Survey Telescope the VST. The instrument will produce dozens of Terabytes/year of raw science and calibration data. Although the instrument will be used for individual science programmes, in about two years of operations it will have observed an area of the sky as large as the ESO-Schmidt survey of the Southern hemisphere. The data will be pre-processed at ESO headquarters, resulting into calibrated images that will be shipped to the user. In turn to obtain and verify the final result, the user needs access to additional back-end processing tools and to the raw and processed calibration data. The OmegaCAM design has strictly procedurized the observing and data reduction methods to aid the definition of the classes of data flowing from Paranal and ESO headquarters to the national data centers and the end users. Within the ESO environment the system will have to match to ESO’s Data Flow System and its pipeline infrastructure. In this system the glue between ESO’s centralized front-end processing and the users decentralized back-end processing is provided by the Python scripting language, used both by the programmers and the end users, and an object oriented database approach, which can in turn be hosted by Python.

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* 16 square degrees centered on (RA, DEC)=(5h27m20s, -69o00\'00\'\') for the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) and 14.7* 10 square degrees centered on (RA, DEC)=(h02m40s, -73o00\'00\'\' for the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) at the epoch J2000. It contains about 1300000 sources towards the LMC and 300000 sources towards the SMC each detected in at least 2 of the 3 photometric bands involved in the survey (I, J, Ks). 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.

An absolute calibration of the DENIS photometric system is presented. It includes the determination of the overall transmission profiles in the 3 bands, namely i, J and Ks, combining contributions from atmosphere, telescope mirrors, instrument lenses and dichroics, filters, and detectors. From these normalized profiles, isophotal and effective wavelengths are computed, using the same synthetic Vega spectrum as that used to support the absolute calibration of many other ground-based and spaceborne photometric systems. Flux densities at zero magnitude are derived and integrated to give in-band fluxes, which are used to compute theoretical zero-points and compare them to observed ones, yielding estimates of the overall throughput of the whole system.

In this paper the list of candidate clusters identified from the I-band data of the ESO Imaging Sur- vey (EIS) is completed using the images obtained over a total area of about 12 square degrees. Together with the data reported earlier the total I-band coverage of EIS is 17 square degrees, which has yielded a sample of 252 clus- ter candidates in the redshift range 0.2 <�z < �1.3. This is the largest optically-selected sample currently available in the Southern Hemisphere. It is also well distributed in the sky thus providing targets for a variety of VLT programs nearly year round.

Preliminary results of a search for distant clusters of galaxies using the recently released I-band data obtained by the ESO Imaging Survey are presented. In this first installment of the survey, data covering about 3 square degrees in I-band are being used. The matched filter algorithm is applied to two sets of frames that cover the whole patch contiguously and these independent realizations are used to assess the performance of the algorithm and to establish, from the data itself, a robust detection threshold. A preliminary catalog of distant clusters is presented, containing 39 cluster candidates with estimated redshifts 0.3 < z < 1.3 over an area of 2.5 square degrees.

The ESO Imaging Survey (EIS) is an ongoing project to carry out public imaging surveys to support programs on the ESO Very Large Telescope (VLT). The first phase of the project started in July 1997 and consisted of a moderately deep, large-area survey (EIS-WIDE) and a deep optical/infrared survey (EIS-DEEP) using the ESO New Technology Telescope (NTT). EIS has recently reached another milestone with the completion of a Pilot Survey using the Wide-Field Image (WFI), an 8k by 8k mosaic CCD camera mounted on the MPG/ESO 2.2m telescope at La Silla. This paper briefly reviews the results of the original EIS and gives an update of the results obtained from the observations carried out as part of the Pilot Survey. Work in progress on the development of an advanced pipeline for handling data from large CCD mosaics and facilities to make the access to data products easier for external users are also discussed.

This paper presents 19 candidate clusters detected using the galaxy catalog extracted from the I-band images taken for the ESO Imaging Survey (EIS). The candidates are found over a region of 1.1 square degrees, located near the South Galactic Pole (EIS Patch B). Combined with the sample re- ported earlier, the number of candidates in the Southern Galac- tic Cap is now 54 over a total area of 3.6 square degrees. V -band images are also available over 2.9 square degrees, and galaxy catalogs extracted from them over a uniform area of 2 square degrees have been used to further explore the reality of the cluster candidates detected in I-band. Nearly all the candi- dates detected in I-band with estimated redshifts z 0:5 are also identified in V. At higher redshifts, only rich candidates are detected in both bands.