Multicolour deep CCD photometric study of the moderately young southern open star clusters NGC 3228, NGC 4103, NGC 5662 and NGC 6087^*

¹ Indian Institute of Astrophysics, Bangalore 560034, India e-mail: sagar@upso.ernet.in
² Anglo-Australian Observatory, P.O. Box 296, Epping NSW 2121, Australia

Send offprint request to: R. Sagar

Received: 2 April 1996
Accepted: 26 June 1996

Abstract

CCD observations in the U, B, V, R and I passbands have been used to generate colour-colour and deep colour-magnitude diagrams for the young open star clusters NGC 3228, NGC 4103,  NGC 5662 and NGC 6087. The sample consists of about 2000 stars reaching down to . The interstellar extinction across the face of the imaged cluster regions seems to be uniform with average values of , 0.34 and 0.22 mag for NGC 4103, NGC 5662 and NGC 6087 respectively. The distances to the clusters  NGC 3228, NGC 4103, NGC 5662 and NGC 6087 have been estimated as , , and kpc respectively, while the corresponding ages estimated from the theoretical stellar evolutionary isochrones fitted to the bright proper motion cluster members are , 30, 80 and 65 Myr respectively. Present data are consistent with the membership of the Cepheid variable V Cen to NGC 5662 and of S Norm to NGC 6087. Heavy contamination by foreground and background field stars has unfortunately made it impossible to reach definite conclusions about the faint luminosity function, and the data do not reach faint enough limits to investigate pre-main sequence stars.