The ESO Public Survey project VMC, ESO program 179.B-2003, PI M. R. Cioni, targets the Magellanic Cloud system in three filters: Y, J and Ks. The main goals are the determination of the spatially resolved star formation history and study the three-dimensional geometry of the system. The sensitivity of the data is designed to reach sources below the oldest main-sequence turn off point of the stellar population and the multi-epochs to measure accurate Ks mean magnitudes for pulsating variable stars, e.g. RR Lyrae stars and Cepheids.

This last data release is based on the complete observations for the VMC survey and data from twelve additional programmes, which add multi-epoch observations to the VMC footprint. There are 68 VISTA tiles encompassing the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), 28 over the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC), 13 across the Bridge and 2 on the Stream. Observations were acquired between October 2009 and January 2023.

This release provides reduced and calibrated tile images belonging to individual observations (‘single OBs’), in addition to the corresponding pawprints (6 per tile), deep co-added images, and source lists (separately for each filter). In addition, also deep co-added tile images and catalogues (separately for each filter), for both individual tiles and combined, as well as band-merged catalogues and catalogues with PSF magnitudes, are provided. This release supersedes all previous data releases of the VMC survey for the combined (deepstacked) data products, whilst providing additional (complementary) images and catalogues of single observations per filter. Overall, it includes about 64 million detections. The total sky coverage of this release is ~170 deg².

It contains 18 catalogues, one band-merged source catalogue, three multi-epoch catalogues, one per filter, one catalogue including the PSF magnitudes, one catalogue of variable sources, proper motion, two extinction catalogues and more containing quasars and background galaxies, Cepheids, RR Lyrae stars and also a Machine Leaning based classification. These catalogues can be queried conjointly via the catalog query interface or TAP.
Data can be browsed and downloaded via the Science Portal or programmatically.
More detailed information is available in the accompanying documentation. The DOI assigned to the VMC data collection is 10.18727/archive/64.