AAS 203rd Meeting, January 2004
Session 99 Stuff in the Milky Way Galaxy
Oral, Wednesday, January 7, 2004, 10:00-11:30am, Regency VI

## [99.05] Deep Optical Imaging Survey of the Galactic Center

P. Zhao, J. Grindlay, S. Laycock, J. Hong, E. M. Schlegel, X. Koenig (CfA)

We have conducted a deep optical imaging survey of the galactic center using the CTIO 4-meter telescope with the Mosaic camera. This is part of our on-going Chandra Multiwavelength Plane (ChaMPlane) Survey project, and is also part of the NOAO long term survey program. In June 2003, we made a mosaic mapping of the galactic center using 6 Mosaic pointings, with V, R, I and H\alpha filters, to cover 2.2 square degrees around the galactic center, which covers 47 Chandra ACIS observations in that area. This is the deepest (~24 mag) optical imaging survey of the galactic center. This survey enables us to detect the optical counterparts of ~95% of the soft band (0.3 - 2.5keV) X-ray sources. However, due severe reddening towards the galactic center, we could only find ~10% optical matches for the Hard band sources (2.5 - 8keV), and most of them are coincident matches with the foreground stars. We present the results of this deep optical imaging survey of the galactic center.

This work is supported by NASA Contract NAS8-39073, NASA grant AR1-2001X, AR2-3002A and NSF grant AST-0098683.

Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, 35#5
© 2003. The American Astronomical Soceity.