Open clusters as galactic disk tracers. I.

In this first contribution, the general goals of our survey are outlined and the strengths and limitations of using star clusters as a Galactic disk tracer sample are discussed. We also present medium-resolution (R~150000) spectroscopy of open cluster stars obtained with the Hydra multi-object spectrographs on the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory 4m and WIYN 3.5m telescopes.

Here we use these data to determine the radial velocities of 3436 stars in the fields of open clusters within about 3kpc, with specific attention to stars having proper motions in the Tycho-2 catalog. Additional radial velocity members (without Tycho-2 proper motions) that can be used for future studies of these clusters were also identified.