The Araucaria Project: Deep Near-Infrared Photometric Maps Of Local And Sculptor Group Galaxies. I. Carina, Fornax, And Sculptor

Deep near-infrared (NIR) J- and K-band photometry of three Local Group dwarf spheroidal galaxies-Fornax, Carina, and Sculptor-is made available for the community. Until now, these data have only been used by the Araucaria Project to determine distances using the tip of the red giant branch and RR Lyrae stars. Now, we present the entire data collection in the form of a database, consisting of accurate J- and K-band magnitudes, sky coordinates, ellipticity measurements, and timestamps of observations, complemented by stars' loci in their reference images. The depth of our photometry reaches about 22 mag at the 5 sigma level, and is comparable to NIR surveys, such as the UKIRT Infrared Deep Sky Survey (UKIDSS) or the VISTA Hemisphere Survey (VHS). Small overlap with VHS and no overlap with UKIDSS makes our database a unique source of quality photometry.