Kinematics of the galactic bulge

Extract

We present spectroscopic observations of ~200 giant stars in two fields toward the Galactic bulge. The positions of fields 588 and 589 are at l,b = (8,7) and (12,3), respectively, which corresponds to a Galactocentric distance of ~1.6 kpc for the stars in the bulge. The K giants were selected from color-magnitude and color-color diagrams produced by scans of B, R and I plates from the APM machine. The spectra were obtained with the MX multi-object spectrograph at the Steward 90″ telescope, and with the Red Channel spectrograph at the MMT. Radial velocities good to ≪ 10 km/s were obtained from cross-correlation techniques. A grid of ~100 standard stars was built to calibrate spectrophotometric indices that provide abundances and luminosities.