The VLT Survey Telescope (VST) at Paranal is now owned and operated by INAF, which is responsible for processing the data and releasing them via the ESO Archive.

The imaging data included in the current DR2 were obtained using the wide-field camera OmegaCAM with the g, r, i, and z filters and belong to the following projects:

• "Pre-supernova Outbursts in Galactic Red Supergiants: Predicting the Next Galactic SN Event" - GALRSG, P.I. F. Bocchino, PROG_ID: 113.26YN.001 
  This is a monitoring program aimed at characterizing the multi-colour light curves of a coeval and co-distant sample of RSGs in the Scutum-Crux region to detect late-stage outbursts and compare them with the most recent models of the final phases of low-mass RSGs before supernova explosion, potentially predicting core collapse before it occurs. The program performs dedicated monitoring of the RSG catalogue in the i and z bands over a large, highly absorbed area of the Galactic plane with a cadence of a few days. For this project, new data are added to the previously released ones.
• "VST Survey of Mass Assembly and Structural Hierarchy" - VST-SMASH, P.I. C. Tortora, PROG_ID: 110.25AA.001 
  This survey aims to conduct a definitive deep imaging census of faint tidal remnants around 27 nearby galaxies (D < 11 Mpc) in the Southern Sky to constrain the hierarchical assembly process via minor mergers. This release includes the deep g, r, and i band images of the galaxies NGC 3109 and Sextans A.

The data have been processed using the advanced Astro-WISE and VST-Tube pipelines, ensuring high-quality calibration and reduction. Additional information can be found in the accompanying documentation.

The fully reduced and stacked images, together with their associated weight maps, are available from the ESO Archive Science Portal or via the Table Access Protocol.

The DOI assigned to the OMEGACAM_INAF data collection is 10.18727/archive/98.
New reduced data will be released approximately twice a year. Future releases will include additional data to complete the currently released projects, along with new projects.