The study of young open clusters provides us with a powerful tool to understand how the star formation process is taking place in the Galaxy. Nevertheless, our knowledge on young open cluster systems is far from being complete as most of them are poor groupings composed by a small number of stars with few photometric and spectroscopic measures. Our ongoing program, developed to obtain accurate photometry of this kind of objects, led us to observe Cr 272 in this opportunity.
Collinder 272, C1327-610, (
= 
,
= 
; 
= 307.62,
= +1.25) belongs exactly to the category of non-studied clusters.
It looks like a sparse handful of moderate bright stars projected against a
dense star background where no remarkable stellar group suggests us the
presence of an open cluster. This fact and the lack of very hot stars have
situated this cluster far from the route of the observers. Actually, the only
extensive photometric survey belongs to Fenkart
et al. (1977) who made observations in the RGU passbands confirming
that it is a real open cluster. No new attempt to improve
our knowledge of Cr 272 neither with photometry nor spectroscopy
has been reported.
The aim of our investigation is to re-examine all the cluster parameters (e.g. reddening, distance and age) and determine its luminosity function along with the slope value of its mass function. Section 2 contains a detail of the observations and the reduction procedure. In Sect. 3 we describe the data analysis and Sect. 4 contains the determination of the luminosity and mass functions. Section 5 gives our conclusions.