A Catalogue of Potential Adaptive Optics Survey Fields from the UKIRT Archive

Abstract

We present a multicolour catalogue of faint galaxies situated close to bright stars, V<15, with the aim of identifying high-redshift galaxies suitable for study with adaptive optics-equipped near-infrared imagers and spectrographs. The catalogue is constructed from archival calibration observations of UKIRT Faint Standard stars with the UFTI camera on UKIRT. We have analysed the deepest 16 fields from the archive to provide a catalogue of galaxies brighter than K~20.3 lying within 25" of the guide stars. We identify 111 objects in a total survey area of 8.7 sq. arcmin, of these 87 are classified as galaxies based on their light profiles in our ~0.5" median seeing K-band images. Of these, 12 galaxies have (J-K)>2.0 consistent with them lying at high-redshifts, z~2. These 12 very red galaxies have K-band magnitudes of K=18.1-20.1 and separations from the guide stars of 4-20" and hence are very well-suited to adaptive optics studies to investigate their morphologies and spectral properties on sub-kpc scales. We provide coordinates and JHK photometry for all catalogued objects.