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D. Zaritsky (Steward Observatory, Univ. of Arizona)
The development of a unique drift scanning instrument, the availability of large blocks of observing time on a small (1m) telescope, and the computational power to accommodate these data all came together within the last five years to enable a seeing-limited, large area survey of our two largest galactic satellites, the Magellanic Clouds. I will present a sample of results from our ongoing UBVI survey of the central 8 by 8 degrees of the LMC and 4 by 4 degrees of the SMC. When complete, the database will contain BV photometry for about 25 million stars and UBVI photometry for about half that many. These data provide information on rare phases of stellar evolution, the internal structure and kinematic evolution of the Magellanic Clouds, the spatially-resolved star formation history of the Clouds, the extragalactic distance scale, the nature of dark matter, and the interpretation of observations of unresolved galaxies beyond the Local Group.
We gratefully acknowledge financial support from the NSF, NASA, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
If you would like more information about this abstract, please follow the link to http://ngala.as.arizona.edu/dennis/mcsurvey.html. This link was provided by the author. When you follow it, you will leave the Web site for this meeting; to return, you should use the Back comand on your browser. [Previous] | [Session 68] | [Next]