Galaxies and Cosmology with DENIS

Abstract

The DENIS survey is currently imaging 21334 deg^2 of the mainly southern sky in the IJK and the observations are expected to go on until mid 2000. The expectations for extragalactic and cosmological research are outlined, including a quantitative assessment of the effects of recent star formation on the measured fluxes of galaxies. The galaxy extraction is much improved with the modeling of the PSF across the 12&#39;x12&#39; frames and the reliability of star/galaxy separation (currently based upon a combination of classical and neural-network based methods) is measured from visual inspection to be >90% at I = 16. The I band counts follow the high bright-end normalization and the J differential counts follow N(J) \simeq 11 \times dex [0.6 (J-14)] deg^{-2} mag^{-1} and are expected to be complete, reliable and photometrically accurate (Δm < 0.1) for J \leq 14.