The Impact of Large Scale Near-IR Sky Surveys

After a year's successful operation, the European DENIS project is now a scientific reality and its close cousin 2MASS (USA) is about to come into operation. The observational and data reduction processes of both DENIS and 2MASS are fully described in this volume.
Already the impact of DENIS is making itself felt in the astronomical community in areas of research as diverse as cosmology, the evolution of galaxies, the interstellar medium, the search for brown dwarfs, and stellar structure and evolution. The first routine results from DENIS and the preliminary results from the 2MASS prototype camera are discussed and compared with other surveys across the wavelength spectrum, both space- and ground-based, including the Digitized Sky Survey, ISO and ROSAT.

Inhalt
I. The New IRSurveys and Other Surveys.- Infrared Surveys: the Impact on Modern Astronomy.- The Deep Near Infrared Southern Sky Survey (DENIS): Progress Status and Scientific Achievements.- The Two Micron All Sky Survey (2MASS): Overview and Status.- The DENIS Operations: Evaluation of the DENIS Survey from La Silla.- The Guide Star Catalog and the Digitized Sky Survey as Resources for Other Surveys.- The ISO Serendipity Survey.- II. Galactic Structure.- Galactic Warps.- Studying Galactic Structure and Evolution with Galaxy Models.- Large-Scale Near-Infrared Counts and Galactic Structure.- Interpreting Surveys With Models.- Galactic Plane Investigation from DENIS Observations.- The Galactic Central Regions at 3.6 µm.- The 15-µm ISOGAL Survey of the Inner Galactic Disc.- Stellar Population Synthesis; Baade's Window: OGLE vs. DENIS.- Modelling the Distribution of Red Variables in the Multicolor (I, J, K, 12 µm) Parameter Space.- Infrared Appearance of Time-Dependent Models of Dustenshrouded Carbon-Mira Atmospheres.- First Results of a Near-infrared Monitoring Programme of OH/IR Stars.- The Database of Galactic Planetary Nebulae at Innsbruck: a DENIS Sub-database.- A Method for Correcting Star Counts in Moderately Overcrowded Fields.- A Model for the Emission of the Stellar Warp in the Near Infrared and its Comparison With the Stellar Warp.- A Large Deep k?-band Galaxy Survey.- 1.6µm Classification of Bright Sources Discovered During 2MASS Prototyping.- A Large-scale 13CO Distribution of the Galaxy: a Global View of Star Forming Clouds.- III. Star Formation Regions and Young Objects.- A DENIS Survey of Orion Molecular Clouds.- Large Scale Distribution of T Tauri Stars as Observed with the Rosat X-Ray Survey.- X-RayIR Observations of Molecular Cloud Cores.-Prospects of Brown Dwarf Detection by Near-IR Surveys (DENIS, 2MASS).- Search for Evolved Objects and Young Stellar Objects from the DENIS Database.- The Search for Star Formation Regions.- From I, J, K To mBol in AGB Stars.- Star Formation in the Vela Molecular Clouds: H2 Imaging Survey.- Near-IR Characterization of AGB Sources.- The Multispectral Study of Galactic Plane Star-Forming Regions.- Clustering Around Herbig Ae/Be Stars.- Young Stellar Objects in L1641: a Submillimeter Continuum Study.- IV. Image Processing and Data.- DENIS Data Processing at PDAC.- The 2MASS Point Source Processing Pipeline: Design and Prototype Results.- The Optical Identification of DENIS Sources.- Photometric Calibration of DENIS.- The ISO Calibration Programme.- The Effect of Stellar Contamination on Different Measures of Galaxy Photometry.- Self Organizing Maps and Imaging Surveys.- Detection of Covered Substructures in Multidimensional Parameter Space: An Application for the DENIS Survey.- The DENIS-LEDA Connexion: a Running Pipeline.- V. Extragalactic.- 2MASS Extragalactic Studies: Early Results from The Prototype Camera.- Preliminary Galaxy Extraction from DENIS Images.- Classification of Galaxies in the Optical Versus the Near Infrared.- Circumnuclear Starbursts in Barred Galaxies.- A New Model of Spectral Evolution of Galaxies: PEGASE.- Broad-band Energy Distribution of Faint IRAS Galaxies.- The Radio Properties of X-ray Selected AGNs.