The Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey - VLT/ISAAC Near-Infrared Imaging of the GOODS-South Field

We present the final public data release of the VLT/ISAAC near-infrared imaging survey in the GOODS-South field. The survey covers an area of 172.5, 159.6 and 173.1 arcmin^2 in the J, H, and Ks bands, respectively. For point sources total limiting magnitudes of J=25.0, H=24.5, and Ks=24.4 (5 sigma, AB) are reached within 75% of the survey area. Thus these observations are significantly deeper than the previous EIS Deep Public Survey which covers the same region. The image quality is characterized by a point spread function ranging between 0.34 arcsec and 0.65 arcsec FWHM. The images are registered with an accuracy of ~0.06 arcsec RMS over the whole field. The overall photometric accuracy, including all systematic effects, adds up to 0.05 mag. The data are publicly available from the ESO science archive facility. We define a catalog of Ks-selected sources which contains JHKs photometry for 7079 objects. We briefly discuss the resulting color distributions in the context of available redshift data. Furthermore, we estimate the completeness fraction and relative contamination due to spurious detections for source catalogs extracted from the survey data. With respect to previous deep near-infrared surveys, the surface density of faint galaxies has been established with unprecedented accuracy by virtue of the unique combination of depth and area of this survey. We derived galaxy number counts over eight magnitudes in flux up to J=25.25, H=25.0, Ks=25.25 (in the AB system). Very similar faint-end logarithmic slopes between 0.24 and 0.27 per mag were measured in the three bands. We found no evidence for a significant change in the slope of the logarithmic galaxy number counts at the faint end.