Observatoire de Paris, Département de Recherche Spatiale, F92190 Meudon,
France
Abstract
Two projects have recently taken up the challenge of deeply surveying
the near-infrared (IR) sky on a large scale: 2MASS in the United States, and DENIS
in Europe. Before the end of the century, the astronomical community will be
provided with one of the largest photometric databases ever produced, including
several hundred million stars with a large proportion of new variables. I will present
the status of these currently ongoing projects and show how astronomers in quest
of new variable stars, as well as those investigating their physical properties, will
benefit from these new databases.