We present deep near-infrared ( NIR ) J _ { s } , H , and K _ { s } -band ISAAC imaging of the WFPC2 field of the Hubble Deep Field South ( HDF-S ) .
The 2.5 \arcmin \times 2.5 \arcmin high Galactic latitude field was observed with the VLT under the best seeing conditions with integration times amounting to 33.6 hours in J _ { s } , 32.3 hours in H , and 35.6 hours in K _ { s } .
We reach total AB magnitudes for point sources of 26.8 , 26.2 , and 26.2 respectively ( 3 \sigma ) , which make it the deepest ground-based NIR observations to date , and the deepest K _ { s } -band data in any field .
The effective seeing of the coadded images is \approx 0 \farcs 45 in J _ { s } , \approx 0 \farcs 48 in H , and \approx 0 \farcs 46 in K _ { s } .
Using published WFPC2 optical data , we constructed a K _ { s } -limited multicolor catalog containing 833 sources down to K _ { s,AB } ^ { tot } \lesssim 26 , of which 624 have seven-band optical-to-NIR photometry .
These data allow us to select normal galaxies from their rest-frame optical properties to high redshift ( z \lesssim 4 ) .
The observations , data reduction and properties of the final images are discussed , and we address the detection and photometry procedures that were used in making the catalog .
In addition , we present deep number counts , color distributions and photometric redshifts of the HDF-S galaxies .
We find that our faint K _ { s } -band number counts are flatter than published counts in other deep fields , which might reflect cosmic variations or different analysis techniques .
Compared to the HDF-N , we find many galaxies with very red V - H colors at photometric redshifts 1.95 < z _ { phot } < 3.5 .
These galaxies are bright in K _ { s } with infrared colors redder than J _ { s } - K _ { s } > 2.3 ( in Johnson magnitudes ) .
Because they are extremely faint in the observed optical , they would be missed by ultraviolet-optical selection techniques , such as the U-dropout method .