Near-Infrared Catalogs
- 28 nearby clusters - z~0.05
- Total area coverage ~21 deg2
- pixel resolution - 0.2ā~0.2kpc
- 1,300,000 detected sources
- 250,000 stars - 750,000 extended sources
- 90% detection competeness J=20.5 K=19.4
- 90% classification completeness J=19.5 K=18.5
Since the number of objects is too large for any individual
analysis, we purged spurious detections and star/galaxy misclassifications
with our interactive tool, which generates several
plots of different combinations of parameters. The example here presente ia a plot of the difference between two aperture magnitudes vs. total magnitude for galaxies (blue heavy dots) and stars (red light dots) as classified by SExtractor before any interactive cleaning. 
In this diagram the star and galaxy loci turn out to be well apart down to Jā19.0. In the good cases (top panel, stable seeing during observations), only few galaxies are misclassified, but even at bright magnitudes. Instead, in cases of strong seeing variation (bottom panel), many more misclassifications of galaxies may be found (heavy blue dots in the locus of stars). Nevertheless, even in these extreme cases, the interactive cleaning pipeline is able to effectively and easily remove such misclassifications. The published catalogs will be regularly updated to correct
for any newly found spurious objects and/or misclassifications,
therefore users are encouraged to rely upon the latest available
version of the catalogs.
Global (average) detection (full lines) and successful classification (dashed lines) rates, obtained from simulations for the WINGS-NIR survey in the J- (left panels) and K-band (right panels). The dotted lines represent the 95, 90 and 75 percent of completeness. The red dotted-dashed line in the upper panels represents the fraction of stars misclassified as galaxies by SExtractor. The bottom panels show that, even at bright magnitudes, some galaxies (a small fraction, indeed) are misclassified as stars. This is likely due to the wide range of effective radii adopted in the simulations, which can sometime produce unrealistically compact luminosity profiles.
Number counts in J- (left panels) and K-band (right panels) compared
with TRILEGAL models of the Galactic stellar distribution from
Girardi et al. (2005) (red dashed lines) and field galaxy counts from
UKIDSS-UDS Hartley et al. (2008) (solid black lines). The blue full
and the red open dots are the galaxy and stars number counts of the corresponding WINGS catalogs. Poissonian error bars are mostly of the dimension of the symbols.