First Catalogue Release of Weak Lensing Shear Measurements from KiDS DR3 Images

Published: 11 Jan 2017
Dark matter distribution from KiDS region G15

The Kilo-Degree Survey (KiDS) is an ESO Public Survey carried out at the VLT Survey Telescope (VST) with the OmegaCAM instrument. KiDs is a weak lensing shear tomography survey and its core science drivers are to map the large scale matter distribution in the Universe and constrain the equation of state of Dark Energy. This catalogue is the first weak lensing shear dataset from KiDS Data Release 3 (DR3) images, based on 454 tiles and a total area of 449.7 square degrees.

The KiDS catalogue provides information regarding galaxy shapes, photometry and photometric redshift for about 14.7 million sources. See the Press Release and the KiDS DR3 documentation related to the images and products on which the weak lensing shear measurements are carried out.

The new catalogue is accessible from the ESO Catalogue Facility query interface, and is accompanied by a comprehensive release description.