2010A&A...511A..50R

We present the final public data release of the VLT/ISAAC near-infrared imaging survey in the GOODS-South field. The survey covers an area of 172.5, 159.6 and 173.1arcmin² in the J, H, and K_s bands, respectively. For point sources total limiting magnitudes of J=25.0, H=24.5, and K_s=24.4 (5σ, AB) are reached within 75% of the survey area. Thus these observations are significantly deeper than the previous EIS Deep Public Survey which covers the same region. The image quality is characterized by a point spread function ranging between 0.34'' and 0.65'' FWHM. The images are registered to a common astrometric grid defined by the GSC2 with an accuracy of ∼0.06'' RMS over the whole field. The overall photometric accuracy, including all systematic effects, adds up to 0.05mag. The data are publicly available from the ESO science archive facility. We describe the data reduction, the calibration, and the quality control process. The final data set is characterized in terms of astrometric and photometric properties, including the PSF and the curve of growth. We establish an empirical model for the sky background noise in order to quantify the variation of limiting depth and statistical photometric errors over the survey area. We define a catalog of K_s-selected sources which contains JHK_s photometry for 7079 objects. Differential aperture corrections were applied to the color measurements in order to