WINGS: a WIde-field nearby Galaxy-cluster survey III. Deep near-infrared
  photometry of 28 nearby clusters
  Context. This is the third paper of a series devoted to the WIde-field Nearby
Galaxy-cluster Survey (WINGS).WINGS is a long term project aimed at gathering
wide-field, multiband imaging and spectroscopy of galaxies in a complete sample
of 77 X-ray selected nearby clusters (0.04<z<0.07) located far from the
galactic plane (b>20deg). The main goal of this project is to establish a local
reference sample for evolutionary studies of galaxies and galaxy clusters.
Aims. This paper presents the near-infrared (J,K) photometric catalogs of 28
clusters of the WINGS sample and describes the procedures followed to construct
them. Methods. The raw data has been reduced at CASU and special care has been
devoted to the final coadding, drizzling technique, astrometric solution and
magnitude calibration for the WFCAM pipeline processed data. We have
constructed the photometric catalogs based on the final calibrated coadded
mosaics (0.79 deg2) in J (19 clusters) and K (27 clusters) bands. A customized
interactive pipeline has been used to clean the catalogs and to make mock
images for photometric errors and completeness estimates. Results. We provide
deep near-infrared photometric catalogs (90% complete in detection rate at
total magnitudes J =20.5, K =19.4, and in classification rate at J = 19.5 and K
= 18.5), giving positions, geometrical parameters, total and aperture
magnitudes for all detected sources. For each field we classify the detected
sources as stars, galaxies and objects of "unknown" nature.
