2 research outputs found
The ARAUCARIA project. Discovery of Cepheid Variables in NGC 300 from a Wide-Field Imaging Survey
Based on observations of NGC 300, obtained with the Wide-Field Camera at the
2.2 m ESO/MPI telescope during 29 nights spread over a 5.3 month interval, 117
Cepheids and 12 Cepheid candidates were found which cover the period range from
115 to 5.4 days. We present a catalog which provides equatorial coordinates,
period, time of maximum brightness, and intensity mean B and V magnitudes for
each variable, and we show phased B and V light curves for all the Cepheids
found. We also present the individual B and V observations for each Cepheid in
our catalog. We find very good agreement between our photometry and that
obtained by Freedman et al. from ground-based CCD data for common stars. The
Cepheids delineate the spiral arms of NGC 300, and a couple of them were
detected very close to the center of the galaxy. From the color-magnitude
diagram of NGC 300 constructed from our data, we expect that our Cepheid
detection is near-complete for variables with periods larger than about 10
days. We present plots of the PL relations in the B and V bands obtained from
our data, which clearly demonstrate the presence of a Malmquist bias for
periods below about 10 days. A thorough discussion of the distance to NGC 300
will be presented in a forthcoming paper which will include the analysis of
photometry in longer-wavelength bands.Comment: 26 pages, Latex. Astronomical Journal in pres