Introduction.- Setting the stage - NIR surveys and their calibration.- What we have to deal with - the NIR sky.- What can be built to deal with that - detectors, instrumentation & AO.- Signal-to-noise considerations.- Observing & calibration strategies.- Data reduction recipes.- Taking data above the atmosphere - changes in observing and data reduction principles.- Concluding remarks.

Jochen Heidt obtained his PhD in 1994 at the University of Heidelberg and has been working at the Landessternwarte Heidelberg as research associate since then. His scientific interests are radiation processes, host galaxies and cluster environment of radio-loud AGN, high-redshift galaxy evolution as well as NIR instrumentation. He worked as instrument scientist for the LUCI project at the Large Binocular Telescope between 2010 and 2018 and was in charge of the commissioning of the instruments. The LUCI instruments are an identical pair of NIR imager and multi-object spectrographs operating in seeing-limited and diffraction-limited mode at the Large Binocular Telescope. In addition he is regularly teaching the astrolab at the University of Heidelberg and attends observing schools as tutor and teacher.