Resolved time-series photometry of Globular Clusters with SAM

Submitted by cbriceno on Wed, 2016-05-25 10:53

In a recent study, Salinas et al. 2016 (http://arxiv.org/pdf/1605.06517v1.pdf, accepted for publication in AJ) used the SOAR AO module (SAM) to obtain spatially resolved calibrated photometry of four globular clusters. With a median FWHM = 0.49", with values as little as 0.35" on a night of good seeing, the authors point out "that the higher image quality provided by SAM allows the calibration of the light curves of the great majority of the variables near the cores of these clusters as well as the detection of new variables even in clusters where image-subtraction searches were already conducted."

Figure 1 of Salinas et al. 2016, showing the color-magnitude diagrams of the four globular clusters M2, M10, M80 and NGC 1261, produced from the SAM data. RR Lyrae stars are indicated with green symbols, blue stragglers in blue, and other variables (long period, eclipsing), in red.