The SEGUE Open Cluster Survey

Over the course of SEGUE operations, the SDSS 2.5m telescope's imaging camera will scan ∼100 open clusters. This will provide an exciting, new, homogeneous data set of open cluster photometry in the SDSS ugriz filter system. Since the 2.5m telescope's imaging scans saturate for stars at r ∼ 14, these data will be be supplemented with ugriz observations on the SDSS 0.5m Photometric Telescope and on the USNO-1.0m telescope, which can effectively observe stars unsaturated down to r ∼ 7-8. In addition, a fraction of these open clusters will be targetted for spectroscopy on the SDSS 2.5m telescope (and some additional followup spectroscopy may take place on other telescopes). These imaging and spectroscopic data will comprise the SEGUE Open Cluster Survey (SOCS) data set. With this data set, the SOCS team plans to calibrate stellar age and metallicity effects and constrain theoretical isochrones in the SDSS ugriz filter system, examine the source of the cluster IMF, understand the spread in ages within a cluster, and look for abundance variations in young clusters that are not dynamically mixed. Finally, the wealth of photometric data from the three telescopes will help further constrain the cross-calibration of the USNO, PT, and 2.5m ugriz filter systems.

T.C.B. acknowledges partial support from AST 04-06784 as well as from grant PHY 02-16783, Physics Frontier Center/Joint Institute for Nuclear Astrophysics (JINA), awarded by the US National Science Foundation.