Astron. Astrophys. 323, 461-468 (1997)

2. Observations and reductions

The sample stars were selected from the catalogue of Prévot et al. (1983) according to their B-V colours and visual magnitudes, in order to have a sample as homogeneous in temperature as possible ; on the other hand, they were chosen to be widely spread out over the Small Magellanic Cloud in order to be able to check the homogeneity of the chemical composition of stars in various regions of the Cloud.

The observations were carried out at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) at La Silla, Chile using the New Technology Telescope (NTT) equipped with the ESO Multi-Mode Imager EMMI and the 3.6m telescope with the CASPEC spectrograph. A resolution of R = / 20 000 and 28 000 for CASPEC and EMMI respectively were obtained.

The reductions were carried out using the code by Spite (1990). Further details on the data and a log-book of the observations are given in Paper I.

As in Paper I, the well studied galactic supergiant Arcturus was used as a reference. A spectrum of Arcturus with a slightly higher resolution and an excellent signal to noise ratio was kindly provided by M. Bessell.

© European Southern Observatory (ESO) 1997

Online publication: June 5, 1998

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