UIT: Ultraviolet Observations of the Small Magellanic Cloud

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Abstract
A mosaic of four UIT far-UV (FUV) (�eff = 1620ûA) images, with derived stellar and HII region photometry, is presented for most of the Bar of the SMC. The UV morphology of the SMC's Bar shows that recent star formation there has left striking features including: a) four concentrations of UV-bright stars spread from northeast to southwest at nearly equal (�30 arcmin=0.5 kpc) spacings; b) one of the concentrations, near DEM 55, comprises a well-defined 8-arcmin diameter ring surrounded by a larger Hring, suggestive of sequential star formation. FUV PSF photometry is obtained for 11,306 stars in the FUV images, resulting in magnitudes m(162). We present a FUV luminosity function for the SMC bar, complete to m(162)�14.5. Detected objects are well correlated with other SMC Population I material; of 711 Hemission-line stars and small nebulae within the UIT fields of view, 520 are identified with FUV sources. The FUV photometry is compared with available ground-based catalogs of supergiants, yielding 191 detections of 195 supergiants with spectral type earlier than F0 in the UIT fields. The (m(162) V) color for supergiants is a sensitive measure of spectral type. The bluest observed colors for each type agree well with colors computed from unreddened Galactic spectral atlas stars

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