Near infrared photometry of unassociated IRAS point sources in the zodiacal belt

Abstract

An observational program to generate a list of bright near infrared sources using IRAS Point Source Catalogue for further studies using lunar occultation technique has been initiated at Physical Research Laboratory, Ahmedabad. The first results consisting of K band photometry of 25 bright unassociated IRAS point sources are presented; for 16 of the sources J and H magnitudes are also given. A large majority of these sources are late type stars with circumstellar shells. A search in Palomar Sky Survey prints to locate the optical counterparts was done for 9 sources; most of them are seen only in the red prints