AAS Meeting #193 - Austin, Texas, January 1999
Session 8. Galactic Morphology and Stellar Populations
Display, Wednesday, January 6, 1999, 9:20am-6:30pm, Exhibit Hall 1

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[8.09] 2MASS Observations of the Magellanic Clouds

S.D. Van Dyk, R.M. Cutri (IPAC/Caltech), M.F. Skrutskie (UMass), M. Egan (AFRL/VSBC)

The Two Micron All Sky Survey (2MASS) has observed the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) and >70 square degrees of the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC), at J (1.25 \mum), H (1.65 \mum), and Ks (2.17 \mum), as part of its routine nightly operations with an automated 1.3-m telescope at CTIO, Chile. The camera observes the sky in the three channels simultaneously, using 256 \times 256 HgCdTe detector arrays. The survey samples the sky in 6\deg \times 8{\farcm}3 scans. The 2MASS Production Processing System provides final atlas images and source extractions with precise photometric calibration and astrometric positions. The survey's 10\sigma sensitivity is 15.8 mag at J, 15.1 at H, and 14.3 at Ks. 2MASS will ultimately detect ~107 point sources in each galaxy and will support analyses of the ages, luminosity and mass functions, and metallicities of the red stellar populations, and provide a census of AGB and carbon stars, as well as extinction maps, across both the LMC and SMC. Here we also compare the 2MASS source extractions with those made by the Midcourse Space Experiment (MSX) for both galaxies, which extends the coverage for sources from wavelength 1--26 \mum.


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The author(s) of this abstract have provided an email address for comments about the abstract: vandyk@ipac.caltech.edu

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