Monday, 5th December at 2.00pm @ Subaru

ABSTRACT: The UKIRT Infrared Deep Sky Survey (UKIDSS) is a seven year programme to produce a legacy IR sky atlas, using UKIRT's new Wide Field Camera (WFCAM). It covers many thousand square degrees overall, but is actually a portfolio of five inter-related surveys ranging from shallow (K~19) through deep (K~21) to ultra deep (K~23) surveys, at both high and low galactic latitudes. As well as producing a multi-purpose resource of long lasting value, UKIDSS specifically aims to find the most distant known quasars and the nearest substellar objects; to determine the stellar mass function and its dependence on environment; to determine the epoch of spheroid formation; and to map the Galactic Plane. UKIDSS data is being uniformly processed and made publicly available through a fully queryable web system - the WFCAM Science Archive (WSA). UKIDSS began operations in May 2005, and will issue an early data release on January 31st 2006. I will summarise performance and prospects so far, and illustrate the use of the WSA.