THE TAIWAN ECDFS NEAR-INFRARED SURVEY: ULTRA-DEEP J AND KS IMAGING IN THE EXTENDED CHANDRA DEEP FIELD-SOUTH

We present ultra-deep J and K-S imaging observations covering a 30' x 30' area of the Extended Chandra Deep Field-South (ECDFS) carried out by our Taiwan ECDFS Near-Infrared Survey (TENIS). The median 5 sigma limiting magnitudes for all detected objects in the ECDFS reach 24.5 and 23.9 mag (AB) for J and K-S, respectively. In the inner 400 arcmin(2) region where the sensitivity is more uniform, objects as faint as 25.6 and 25.0 mag are detected at 5 sigma. Thus, this is by far the deepest J and K-S data sets available for the ECDFS. To combine TENIS with the Spitzer IRAC data for obtaining better spectral energy distributions of high-redshift objects, we developed a novel deconvolution technique (IRACLEAN) to accurately estimate the IRAC fluxes. IRACLEAN can minimize the effect of blending in the IRAC images caused by the large point-spread functions and reduce the confusion noise. We applied IRACLEAN to the images from the Spitzer IRAC/MUSYC Public Legacy in the ECDFS survey (SIMPLE) and generated a J+K-S-selected multi-wavelength catalog including the photometry of both the TENIS near-infrared and the SIMPLE IRAC data. We publicly release the data products derived from this work, including the J and K-S images and the J+K-S-selected multi-wavelength catalog.