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R. Wilhelm (Southwestern University)
The globular cluster NGC 6934 is an ideal cluster to use in the search for co-moving field stars that might represent a tidal tail or even a stellar stream in the halo. NGC 6934 has been shown in a recent paper (Dinescu et al. 1999) to be a retrograde globular cluster, which shares orbital parameters, with NGC 7089. It also has a very large line-of-sight velocity (/~ -400 km/s) which is almost 2 sigma from the mean of the halo in this direction. Because of this, any field stars found in the near spatial vicinity of NGC 6934 and with the same line-of-sight velocity are very likely to be members of a co-moving population. As a first step in a program to identify such a population I will present photometry results for a large sample of field stars near NGC 6934. The data presented will be from several fields in the outer regions of the cluster and several more from fields 5 - 7 degrees from the cluster center. The cluster data is used to set fiducial lines for identifying population candidates from the large number of contaminating disk stars. I will also present results for a fainter sample using the Digitized Sky Survey fields, calibrated with the observed stars from this program. Also included will be a C-M diagram of the outer regions of NGC 6934 and a list of newly identified variable stars.
The author(s) of this abstract have provided an email address for comments about the abstract: wilhelmr@southwestern.edu