We have conducted UBVI CCD photometry of an intermediate-age open cluster NGC 559 to investigate the effect of dynamical evolution on the stellar distributions in NGC 559. Our photometry allows better estimates of distance and age of the cluster owing to much deeper photometry (V ≤ 21) than previous ones. It is found that the luminosity function and mass function as well as the spatial stellar distributions are affected by the dynamical evolution. Mass segregation leads to the central concentration of the high mass stars, which results in the flattened mass function inside the half mass radius.
We developed a CCD camera that can observe wide fields on the sky. We tested the field of views using various lenses. For cooling the CCD chip, we used a thermoelectric cooling device and tested the cooling efficiency. This camera will continuously observe a part of the sky. The data from the camera will be used to decide the current weather condition by the real-time star counting program (SCount) which will be developed later.
We developed an observation program for a 2K CCD camera, which was newly attached at the SOAO (Sobaeksan Optical Astronomy Observatory) 61cm telescope. The program was designed to control the telescope as well as the CCD camera and to monitor the CCD image quality, with very easy under the window-based graphical user interface (GUI). Furthermore, applying the automated differential photometric algorithm, we can obtain the instrumental magnitudes of several variable and comparison stars in real-time. Simultaneous photometry enables us to get precise differential magnitudes of variable stars even if the weather condition is not photometric. This new observation system has been using for many astronomical observations from September, 2001.
We present the characteristics of the 2K CCD camera at the Bohyunsan Optical Astronomy Observatory of the Korea Astronomy Observatory at the time of its development. The purpose of this paper is to support the observers who may need detailed information on the characteristics of the camera and to provide helpful information on the optimization' of a CCD camera for those who try to develop their own camera. The 2K CCD camera was optimized to have a gain of 1.8e−/ADU and a read out noise of 7e− from an experiment using radioactive 55 Fe X-ray source. The charge transfer efficiency was measured as 0.9999976 for serial and 0.9999942 for parallel direction, which means 0.5% charge loss along the serial direction and 1.2% along the parallel direction across the chip. The quantum efficiency of the camera was measured from an experiment using a homogeneous light source consisting of a halogen lamp and an integrating sphere with a monochromator. The resulting quantum efficiency of the camera peaked at the wavelength range 600-700 nm with the value of \-0.89 .
We obtained three-color composite. images of 78 celestial objects most of which are listed in Messier catalogue. In order to make color images, 118 raw image sets were taken with B, V, R, I and H-alpha filters. We used the 2k CCD camera attached to the 1.8 m telescope of Bohyunsan Optical Astronomy Observatory. These composite images are to be used for educational purposes or public releases. The images are presented on the website, http://www.boao.re.kr/-ybjeon/boao_images.htrnl.
UBVI CCD photometry of open cluster NGC 2324 is presented. C-M diagrams of this cluster show well-defined main sequence with a red giant clump centered at B - V =1.05, V =13.45. We derived the major cluster characteristics; E(B - V)=0.17±0.12 from color-color diagram and mean color of red giant clump stars, (m - M)o=13.1±0.1 from zero age main sequence fitting, and [Fe/H]~-0.32 from comparison the theoretical model developed by Bertelli et al. (1994) to the observed C-M diagrams. We estimate the age of NGC 2324 to be log t~8.8 by applying isochrone fitting and morphological age index method.