The INT wide field imaging survey (WFS)

The 2.5 m Isaac Newton Telescope (INT) is currently bring used to carry out a major multi-colour, multi-epoch wide field CCD based survey over an area of similar to 100 deg(2). The survey parameters have been chosen to maximi se scientific return over a wide range of scientific areas and to complemen t other surveys being carried out elsewhere. Unique aspects of the survey a re that it concentrates on regions of sky that are easily accessible from t elescopes in both Northern and Southern terrestrial hemispheres and that it is the first public survey to use tilters similar to that bring used by th e Sloan Digital Sky Survey. A major aim of the the INT Wide Field Survey pr ogramme is to bridge the gap between the all-sky photographic 2 band survey s such us Palomar and UK Schmidt sky surveys and the ultra-deep keyhole sur vey such as the Hubble Deep Field. Apart from the science that can be deriv ed directly from the optical data. the datasets will provide ideal target l ists for multi-object follow-up with fibre and slit based systems (e.g. GMO S, 2DF, WYFFOS, FMOS) on 4 m and 8 m class telescopes. (C) 2001 Elsevier Sc ience B.V. All rights reserved.