The VVV Survey of the Milky Way: first year results

MINNITI, DANTE ET AL; PADILLA, NELSON D.

San Juan

Workshop; 54ª Reunión Anual de la Asociación Argentina de Astronomía; 2011

The VISTA Variables in the Via Lactea (VVV) is an ESO public near-IR variability survey that is scanning the Milky Way bulge and an adjacent section of the Galactic mid-plane. The survey will take 1929 hours of observations with the VISTA 4.1-m telescope during five years, covering a billion point sources across an area of 520 sqdeg, including 36 known globular clusters and more than 350 open clusters. The final product will be a deep IR atlas in five passbands (0.9 - 2.5 microns) and a catalogue of more than a million variable point sources.