VIKING

• VIKING is the VISTA Kilo-degree Infrared Galaxy survey.

VIKING is a survey with VISTA covering the 1500 deg2 of the VST-KIDS survey in the 5 broadband filters Z,Y,J,H,Ks. Combined with KIDS, this will yield a 9-band optical-IR survey with depth approximately 2 mag deeper than Sloan and 1.4 mag deeper than UKIDSS-LAS. The survey has numerous motivations including the highest redshift quasars, brown dwarfs, improved photometric redshifts for weak lensing and baryon oscillations, z > 1 clusters, stellar masses for the KIDS lensing objects, and studying galaxy evolution and clustering over the interval 0 < z < 1.2. In area and depth, the KIDS+VIKING survey is a natural intermediate between the shallower SDSS, VSTATLAS and UKIDSS-LAS, and the deeper 30 deg2 surveys. Some part of it is observable year-round from Paranal, providing a rich source of targets for VLT follow up.