High-resolution optical imaging of the core of the globular cluster M15 with FastCam

Díaz-Sánchez, Anastasio; Pérez-Garrido, Antonio; Villó, Isidro; Rebolo, R.; Pérez-Prieto, J. A.; Oscoz, A.; Hildebrandt, S. R.; López, R. L.; Rodríguez, L. F.
Bibliographical reference

Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Volume 423, Issue 3, pp. 2260-2269.

Advertised on:
7
2012
Number of authors
9
IAC number of authors
6
Citations
6
Refereed citations
5
Description
We present high-resolution I-band imaging of the core of the globular cluster M15 obtained at the 2.5-m Nordic Optical Telescope with FastCam, a low readout noise L3CCD-based instrument. Short exposure times (30 ms) were used to record 200 000 images (512 × 512 pixels each) over a period of 2 h and 43 min. The lucky imaging technique was then applied to generate a final image of the cluster centre with full width at half-maximum ˜0.1 arcsec and 13 × 13 arcsec2 field of view. We obtained a catalogue of objects in this region with a limiting magnitude of I= 19.5. I-band photometry and astrometry are reported for 1181 stars. This is the deepest I-band observation of the M15 core at this spatial resolution. Simulations show that crowding is limiting the completeness of the catalogue. At shorter wavelengths, a similar number of objects have been reported using Hubble Space Telescope (HST)/Wide Field Planetary Camera observations of the same field. The cross-match with the available HST catalogues allowed us to produce colour-magnitude diagrams where we identify new blue straggler star candidates and previously known stars of this class.
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