Abstract
During its prototyping phase, the Two Micron All-Sky Survey (2MASS) has imaged more than 200 square degrees of the sky. This work has revealed a large number of bright infrared sources (Ks ≤ 5.0) with faint optical counterparts owing to obscuration in the Galactic plane. The bright sources are most likely evolved stars within a few kiloparsecs of the Sun. Such evolved stars will ultimately be one of the primary tools for reconstructing the structure of the Galaxy using 2MASS data. In order to characterize this population and demonstrate the utility of infrared spectroscopy for spectral identification and radial velocity measurements we have obtained multi-epoch infrared (1.61–1.64 µm) spectra of 206 bright sources identified by the prototype survey at the KPNO 0.9 m coudé feed telescope using the University of Massachusetts NICMOS3 camera (NICMASS) during four observing runs in 1994–95.
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© 1997 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
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Skrutskie, M.F., Lysaght, M.G., Weinberg, M.D. (1997). 1.6µM Classification of Bright Sources Discovered during 2MASS Prototyping. In: Garzón, F., Epchtein, N., Omont, A., Burton, B., Persi, P. (eds) The Impact of Large Scale Near-IR Sky Surveys. Astrophysics and Space Science Library, vol 210. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-5784-1_22
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-5784-1_22
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-94-010-6442-2
Online ISBN: 978-94-011-5784-1
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