LMC far-ultraviolet imaging

We present an analysis of the deepest pure UV observations with the highest angular resolution ever performed, a set of 12 exposures with the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 and F160BW filter obtained in parallel observing mode, which covers ~12arcmin^2^ in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), north of the bar, and in the "general field" regime of the LMC. The 341 independent measurements of 198 objects represent an accumulated exposure of >=2x10^4^s and reveal stars as faint as m_UV_~=22mag.

The observations show that about two-thirds of the UV emission from the LMC is emitted by our HST-detected UV stars in the field, that is, not in clusters or associations. We identified optical counterparts in the Royal Observatory Edinburgh/Naval Research Laboratory photometric catalog for about one-third of the objects.