WINGS: a WIde-field nearby Galaxy-cluster survey III. Deep near-infrared photometry of 28 nearby clusters

Context. This is the third paper in a series devoted to the WIde-field Nearby Galaxy-cluster Survey (WINGS). WINGS is a long-term project aimed at gathering wide-field, multiband imaging and spectroscopy of galaxies in a complete sample of 77 X-ray selected, nearby clusters (0.04 < z < 0.07) located far from the galactic plane (vertical bar b vertical bar >= 20 degrees). The main goal of this project is to establish a local reference sample for evolutionary studies of galaxies and galaxy clusters. Aims. This paper presents the near-infrared (J, K) photometric catalogs of 28 clusters of the WINGS sample and describes the procedures followed to construct them. Methods. The raw data has been reduced at CASU and special care has been devoted to the final coadding, drizzling technique, astrometric solution, and magnitude calibration for the WFCAM pipeline-processed data. We constructed the photometric catalogs based on the final calibrated, coadded mosaics (approximate to 0.79 deg(2)) in J (19 clusters) and K ( 27 clusters) bands. A customized interactive pipeline was used to clean the catalogs and to make mock images for photometric errors and completeness estimates. Results. We provide deep near-infrared photometric catalogs (90% complete in detection rate at total magnitudes J approximate to 20.5, K approximate to 19.4, and in classification rate at J approximate to 19.5 and K approximate to 18.5), giving positions, geometrical parameters, total and aperture magnitudes for all detected sources. For each field we classify the detected sources as stars, galaxies, and objects of unknown nature.