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We report the results of a near-infrared survey for long-period variables in a field of view of 20 arcmin by 30 arcmin towards the Galactic Centre (GC). We have detected 1364 variables, of which 348 are identified with those reported in Glass et al. (2001). We present a catalogue and photometric measurements for the detected variables and discuss their nature. We also establish a method for the simultaneous estimation of distances and extinctions using the period-luminosity relations for the JHKs bands. Our method is applicable to Miras with periods in the range 100--350 d and mean magnitudes available in two or more filter bands. While J-band means are often unavailable for our objects because of the large extinction, we estimated distances and extinctions for 143 Miras whose H- and Ks-band mean magnitudes are obtained. We find that most are located at the same distance to within our accuracy. Assuming that the barycentre of these Miras corresponds to the GC, we estimate its distance modulus to be 14.58+-0.02(stat.)+-0.11(syst.) mag, corresponding to 8.24+-0.08(stat.)+-0.42(syst.) kpc. We have assumed the distance modulus to the LMC to be 18.45 mag, and the uncertainty in this quantity is included in the systematic error above. We also discuss the large and highly variable extinction. Its value ranges from 1.5 mag to larger than 4 mag in A(Ks) except towards the thicker dark nebulae and it varies in a complicated way with the line of sight. We have identified mid-infrared counterparts in the Spitzer/IRAC catalogue of Ramirez et al. (2008) for most of our variables and find that they follow rather narrow period-luminosity relations in the 3.6 to 8.0 micrometre wavelength range.
Mira variables are useful distance indicators, due to their high luminosities and well-defined period-luminosity relation. We select 1863 Miras from SAAO and MACHO observations to examine their use as distance estimators in the Milky Way. We measure
Due to the extreme extinction towards the Galactic centre ($A_{V} sim 30$ mag), its stellar population is mainly studied in the near-infrared (NIR) regime. Therefore, a proper analysis of the NIR extinction curve is necessary to fully characterise th
We present the near-infrared observations of population II Cepheids in the Galactic bulge from VVV survey. We identify 340 population II Cepheids in the Galactic bulge from VVV survey based on their match with OGLE-III Catalogue. The single-epoch $JH
We study the near-infrared properties of 690 Mira candidates in the central region of the Large Magellanic Cloud, based on time-series observations at JHKs. We use densely-sampled I-band observations from the OGLE project to generate template light c
We present near-IR imaging of a sample of the faint, hard X-ray sources discovered in the 2001 Chandra ACIS-I survey towards the Galactic Centre (GC) (Wang et al. 2002). These ~800 discrete sources represent an important and previously undetected pop