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The UKIDSS Eighth Data Release (DR8), including catalogues and images, took place on 3rd Sept 2010, and may be accessed from the WFCAM Science Archive (WSA). DR8 is proprietary to ESO astronomers for 18 months. The current World Release is DR4.
Before World Release, access to the data requires a username and password, as explained here (and first announced in the ESO Messenger, No. 119, Mar 2005). You can get your username and password from your 'community contact' (someone at your institution). To see if you have a community contact, check the list of registered communities. If your organisation or department needs to be added, please talk amongst yourselves to choose a contact, and send an email to Steve Warren, with copy to the other members of the UKIDSS registration team (n.b. remove spaces), providing the name and email address of the contact. We will add the community to the database, and provide the contact with the details of how to upload the list of users.
The teams which built WFCAM, processed the data, and implemented the UKIDSS surveys have no proprietary time. When you use UKIDSS data, please credit their efforts with something similar to the following wording:
'The UKIDSS project is defined in Lawrence et al (2007). UKIDSS uses the UKIRT Wide Field Camera (WFCAM; Casali et al, 2007). The photometric system is described in Hewett et al (2006), and the calibration is described in Hodgkin et al. (2009). The pipeline processing and science archive are described in Irwin et al (2009, in prep) and Hambly et al (2008).'
Reference may also be appropriate to the individual survey release papers:
EDR: Dye et
al. (2006)
DR1: Warren et
al. (2007)
DR2: Warren et
al. (2007)
The EDR paper is also the baseline technical paper for survey releases. The DR1 and DR2 papers document some changes in technical details, and describe the contents of each release. For subsequent releases technical changes are recorded on the page for each survey release in the archive. A full listing of UKIDSS reference papers, and papers that use UKIDSS data is provided on the Science page.
The correct designation for UKIDSS sources is along the lines:
ULAS JHHMMSS.ss+DDMMSS.s
or UDXS, UUDS, UGPS, UGCS as appropriate for the survey in which the source was found. Here the U stands for UKIDSS. These acronyms have been registered with the IAU.
Coordinates are truncated, rather than rounded, to the specified number of decimal places. Note also that the 'J' is required, despite the fact that the coords are referred to the ICRS. There is an IAU web page which is the standard reference for naming issues.