1.12. Structure of the inner galactic disk and the bulge - first results

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Is there an age and/or a metallicity gradient in the Bulge? This is a notoriously difficult question because of the well known age-metallicity-distance degeneracy in colour magnitude diagrams (CMD) as well as the severe crowding and large reddening towards the Galactic Bulge. The current observational data on the bulge in our galaxy and bulges in other spiral galaxies point in disparate directions, that is evidence for both early (e.g. existence of very old halo and bulge globular clusters) and late formation (e.g. Sgr dSph and bar instabilities) can be found as well as the existence and non-existence of metallicity gradients (for a review of the observational status see Wyse, Gilmore & Franx 1997). We here present the CMDs for two fields, Baade's window and SGR-I, Fig.1c and d. Both these regions have low extinction. To determine the age and metallicity for these stars we compare the CMDs with CMDs of globular clusters, also observed with WFPC2, of known metallicity and age, Fig.1a and b. This method enables us to work entirely in the in-flight magnitude system of WFPC2 and there is no need for transformations to standard colours and magnitudes, something which is not straight forward for WFPC2 passbands.