WINGS: a WIde-field nearby Galaxy-cluster survey III. Deep near-infrared photometry of 28 nearby clusters

TL;DR

This paper presents deep near-infrared photometric catalogs for 28 galaxy clusters from the WINGS survey, providing valuable data for studying galaxy and cluster evolution.

Contribution

It introduces a detailed methodology for constructing high-quality near-infrared catalogs for multiple galaxy clusters, enhancing the WINGS dataset.

Findings

Deep near-infrared catalogs with high completeness and classification accuracy

Photometric data for 28 galaxy clusters in J and K bands

Methodology for data reduction and catalog cleaning

Abstract

Context. This is the third paper of a series devoted to the WIde-field Nearby Galaxy-cluster Survey (WINGS).WINGS is a long term project aimed at gathering wide-field, multiband imaging and spectroscopy of galaxies in a complete sample of 77 X-ray selected nearby clusters (0.04<z<0.07) located far from the galactic plane (b>20deg). The main goal of this project is to establish a local reference sample for evolutionary studies of galaxies and galaxy clusters. Aims. This paper presents the near-infrared (J,K) photometric catalogs of 28 clusters of the WINGS sample and describes the procedures followed to construct them. Methods. The raw data has been reduced at CASU and special care has been devoted to the final coadding, drizzling technique, astrometric solution and magnitude calibration for the WFCAM pipeline processed data. We have constructed the photometric catalogs based on the final calibrated coadded mosaics (0.79 deg2) in J (19 clusters) and K (27 clusters) bands. A customized interactive pipeline has been used to clean the catalogs and to make mock images for photometric errors and completeness estimates. Results. We provide deep near-infrared photometric catalogs (90% complete in detection rate at total magnitudes J =20.5, K =19.4, and in classification rate at J = 19.5 and K = 18.5), giving positions, geometrical parameters, total and aperture magnitudes for all detected sources. For each field we classify the detected sources as stars, galaxies and objects of "unknown" nature.