Thirty years after the pioneering enterprise of Neugebauer and collabo rators, the astronomical sky is surveyed anew in the near infrared range with a gain in sensitivity greater than 4 orders of magnitude. Data have started to come through the "pipelines" routinely and at the turn of the century, the astronomical community will be provided with immense databases that will eventually contain accurate positions and 3- colour (or even 4-colour after merging DENIS and 2MASS data) photometry for hundreds million of stars and millions of galaxies. This fantastic harvest of data will eventually...

After a year's successful operation, the European DENIS project is now a scientific reality and its close cousin 2MASS (USA) is about to come into operation. The observational and data reduction processes of both DENIS and 2MASS are fully described in this volume.
Already the impact of DENIS is making itself felt in the astronomical community in areas of research as diverse as cosmology, the evolution of galaxies, the interstellar medium, the search for brown dwarfs, and stellar structure and evolution. The first routine results from DENIS and the preliminary results from the 2MASS...