Queries, suggestions to:
Steve Warren,
UKIDSS Survey Scientist
+44(0)2075947554
Queries on data reduction
to casuhelp
The UKIDSS data access policy explains the rules for sharing UKIDSS data with astronomers from outside ESO
Citing UKIDSS in papers using UKIDSS data
IAU naming convention for UKIDSS sources

UKIDSS is the next generation near-infrared sky survey, the successor to 2MASS. UKIDSS began in May 2005 and will survey 7500 square degrees of the Northern sky, extending over both high and low Galactic latitudes, in JHK to K=18.3. This depth is three magnitudes deeper than 2MASS. UKIDSS will be the true near-infrared counterpart to the Sloan survey, and will produce as well a panoramic clear atlas of the Galactic plane. In fact UKIDSS is made up of five surveys and includes two deep extra-Galactic elements, one covering 35 square degrees to K=21, and the other reaching K=23 over 0.77 square degrees.

The survey instrument is WFCAM on the UK Infrared Telescope (UKIRT) in Hawaii. WFCAM has four 2048x2048 Rockwell devices, at 94% spacing, as illustrated at the top. The pixel scale of 0.4 arcsec gives an exposed solid angle of 0.21 sq. degs.

Four of the principal quarry of UKIDSS are: the coolest and nearest brown dwarfs, high-redshift dusty starburst galaxies, elliptical galaxies and galaxy clusters at redshifts 1‹z‹2, and the highest-redshift quasars, at z=7. UKIDSS aims to discover the nearest object to the Sun (outside the solar system) as well as some of the farthest known objects in the Universe.

The UKIDSS Consortium is a collection of some 100 astronomers who are responsible for the design and execution of the survey. The data become available to the entire ESO community immediately they are entered into the archive. Release to the world follows 18 months after each release to ESO.



Science News


13 June 2008: The clustering of BzK galaxies (Hartley et al., in prep.). Galaxies in the UDS have been selected to lie in the redshift range 1.4 < z < 2.5 and can be characterised as either star-forming (sBzK) or passive (pBzK) by the Daddi et al. (2004) criterea. In this redshift range it is the passive galaxies that are found to be the more highly clustered. The clustering of a set of galaxies can be directly linked to the mass of the dark matter halos in which they reside; in the case of the pBzKs the dark matter halos have mass in excess of 1013 solar masses.

Science News archive

2 July 2008 Preliminary announcement of workshop 'Science from UKIDSS II', London, 15-17 Dec 2008.

4 April 2008 UDS Press Release 'Witnessing the formation of distant galaxies'

31 March 2008 UDS Press Release 'Old galaxies stick together in the young Universe'

1 July 2008 The first part (DXS, GCS, LAS) of the staged release of DR4 announced.

9 January 2008 World Release of UKIDSS DR1 was announced today at the AAS.

6 December 2007 The UKIDSS Third Data Release (DR3) is now available.