The VIRMOS deep imaging survey -: III.: ESO/WFI deep U-band imaging of the 0226-04 deep field

In this paper we describe the U-band imaging of the F02 deep field, one of the fields in the VIRMOS Deep Imaging Survey. The observations were done at the ESO/MPG 2.2 m telescope at La Silla (Chile) using the 8k x 8k Wide-Field Imager (WFI). The field is centered at alpha(J2000) = 02(h)26(m) 00(s) and delta(J2000) = -04degrees30'00, the total covered area is 0.9 deg(2) and the limiting magnitude (50% completeness) is U-AB similar to 25.4 mag. Reduction steps, including astrometry, photometry and catalogue extraction, are first discussed. The achieved astrometric accuracy (rms) is similar to0.2 with reference to the I-band catalog and similar to0.07 internally (estimated from overlapping sources in different exposures). The photometric accuracy including uncertainties from photometric calibration, is <0.1 mag. Various tests are then performed as a quality assessment of the data. They include: (i) the color distribution of stars and galaxies in the field, done together with the BVRI data available from the VIMOS survey; (ii) the comparison with previous published results of U-band magnitude-number counts of galaxies.