VISIONS - VISTA Star Formation Atlas

VISIONS is a sub-arcsec near-infrared atlas of all nearby (d < 500 pc) star formation complexes accessible from the southern hemisphere. The final atlas will contain tens of thousands of young stars (from 0.1 to 10 Myr), will be sensitive to objects down to a few Jupiter masses, and reach spatial resolutions of 100-250 AU in the nearby star-forming regions. The survey is designed to deliver deep high-sensitivity observations of areas with large amounts of extinction, control fields which sample the predominant stellar populations in largely extinction-free regions, and wide field data in multiple epochs on large areas surrounding the targeted star-forming regions. The image quality is excellent throughout the entire survey with most data featuring point source FWHMs better than 1 arcsec. Compared to 2MASS, the survey reaches up to 6 mag fainter sensitivity limits.