Study of the Nuclear Bulge region of the Galaxy

K. S. Baliyan¹, S. Ganesh¹, U. C. Joshi¹, I. S. Glass², and T. Nagata³

¹ Physical Research Laboratory, Ahmedabad, India
² South African Astronomical Observatory, Observatory, South Africa
³ Nagoya University, Nagoya, Japan

E-mail contact: baliyan_AT_prl.ernet.in, shashi_AT_prl.ernet.in

A large part of the Inner Galaxy was observed with the SIRIUS Camera mounted on the Infrared Survey Facility (IRSF) telescope at the South African Astronomical Observatory, Sutherland, during June-July 2002. The SIRIUS camera has three HAWAII (1K x 1K) detectors for simultaneous imaging in the J,H and K_S bands. With pixel scales of 0.43'' and nearly sub-arcsec seeing most of the time, these observations have resulted in the deepest views of a large area of the Nuclear Bulge in the Milky Way. The incompleteness and confusion limited nature of the undersampled near infrared surveys, such as DENIS and 2MASS prompted us to obtain these deep images over the entire Nuclear Bulge region with particular emphasis on the regions covered by the ISOGAL survey at 7um and 15um (see poster ... and also http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap000629.html) and the X-ray survey by the Chandra Observatory. First results from this near infrared survey will be presented in the course of this talk.