[LFR2003] 278 , the SIMBAD biblio

We present deep near-infrared (NIR) J_s-, H-, and K_s-band ISAAC imaging of the Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2) field of the Hubble Deep Field South (HDF-S). The 2'.5x2'.5 high Galactic latitude field was observed with the Very Large Telescope under the best seeing conditions, with integration times amounting to 33.6 hr in J_s, 32.3 hr in H, and 35.6 hr in K_s. We reach total AB magnitudes for point sources of 26.8, 26.2, and 26.2, respectively (3 σ), which make it the deepest ground-based NIR observation to date and the deepest K_s-band data in any field. The effective seeing of the co-added images is ~0".45 in J_s, ~0".48 in H, and ~0".46 in K_s. Using published WFPC2 optical data, we constructed a K_s-limited multicolor catalog containing 833 sources down to K^tot_s,AB≲26, of which 624 have seven-band optical-to-NIR photometry. These data allow us to select normal galaxies from their rest-frame optical properties to high redshift (z≲4). The observations, data reduction, and properties of the final images are discussed, and we address the detection and photometry procedures that were used in making the catalog. In addition, we present deep number counts, color distributions, and photometric redshifts of the HDF-S galaxies. We find that our faint K_s-band number counts are flatter than published counts in other deep fields, which might reflect cosmic variations or different analysis techniques. Compared to the HDF-N, we find many galaxies with very red V-H colors at photometric redshifts 1.95<z_phot<3.5. These galaxies are bright in K_s, with infrared colors redder than J_s-K_s>2.3 (in Johnson magnitudes). Because they are extremely faint in the observed optical, they would be missed by ultraviolet-optical selection techniques, such as the U-dropout method.