HST Imaging of the Large Magellanic Cloud: The Field Star Population near 30 Doradus

Abstract

We present deep color-magnitude diagrams for two fields in the Large Magellanic Cloud, located about 6 arcminutes from 30 Doradus. The data are from images taken with the Hubble Space Telescope's Wide Field Camera, as part of the Medium Deep Survey Key Project. We describe a procedure for measuring stellar magnitudes in relatively crowded HST images based on aperture corrections. This procedure is used to obtain color-magnitude diagrams containing a total of ~7200 stars with 18 < V < 24. The color-magnitude diagrams shows a well populated main-sequence, and a pronounced giant branch concentrated at V ~ 20. There is tentative evidence for a population of low metallicity main-sequence stars, which may confirm the suggestion that the LMC has, like spiral galaxies, a metal-poor, spheroidal component. (SECTION: Galaxies)