AAS 207th Meeting, 8-12 January 2006
Session 118 TPF Instrumentation
Poster, Wednesday, 9:20am-6:30pm, January 11, 2006, Exhibit Hall

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[118.04] Photometry and Astrometry of SIM Planetquest Globular Cluster Targets

T. M. Girard (Yale), A. Sarajedini (U. Florida), B. Chaboyer (Dartmouth)

Our SIM Planetquest key project will obtain parallaxes with an accuracy of 5 microarcseconds for a sample of 21 relatively nearby globular clusters. The distances to these globular clusters will be determined to an accuracy of 1 to 5%. The SIM Planetquest will observe 5 - 10 bright giant branch or horizontal branch stars in each globular cluster. To maximize the efficiency of our SIM Planetquest observations, we are obtaining wield field of view photometry and astrometry of our target globular clusters. Images have been obtained with Mosaic CCD cameras on the CTIO 4-m (36 x 36 arcmin field of view) and WIYN 0.9m on Kitt Peak (59 x 59 arcmin). To date, observations of 19 globular clusters have been obtained. Photometry of all stars in the field of view is obtained in the standard BV system and used to compile a list of potential target stars for SIM Planetquest. An astrometric solution is obtained using the UCAC2 catalog, leading to positions with a precision of 25 to 40 milli-arcseconds. These positions are being used to obtain multi-fiber spectroscopic observations of potential target stars.


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