The Survey

VISIONS will observe all the star forming clouds within 500 pc from Earth (about 1600 light-years) accessible from the Southern Hemisphere. The VISIONS survey includes three separate observing categories: 

  1. Wide multi-epoch observations of nearby star forming regions to derive proper motions
  2. Deep observations of the high column-density regions for dust mapping and YSO characterization 
  3. Control field observations for statistical comparison

The star-forming regions covered by VISIONS.

Overlap between VISIONS and previous VISTA Public Surveys (top) and observability diagram for Paranal (bottom).