Large Magellanic Cloud Near-Infrared Synoptic Survey (LMCNISS): Overview and Science Highlights for Classical and hype-II Cepheids

The Large Magellanic Cloud Near-Infrared Synoptic Survey (LMCNISS) is a dedicated project to obtain time-series observations of LMC in JHKs bands, with main science goal to investigate Cepheid period-luminosity (P-L) relations in the near infrared. Observations of LMCNISS were carried out using the CPAPIR infrared detector equipped on the CTIO 1.5m Telescope in 2006 and 2007, for a total of 32 nights. The LMCNISS purposely targeted the central part of the LMC that covered 18 square degrees to image Cepheids based on the OGLE-II Catalog. Overall, light curves in JHK bands were obtained for similar to 1400 classical Cepheids and similar to 80 Type-II Cepheids after the release of OGLE-III catalogs. We present an overview of our LMCNISS project as well as several science highlights. These include the calibration of PL relations in JHKs bands and the period-Wesenheit (P-W) relations after combining with optical VI-band data from OGLE-III, their applications in deriving distances to local galaxies (with classical Cepheids) and globular clusters (with Type-II Cepheids), and possible non-linearity in these relations.