Description
Three very massive clusters are known to reside in the Galactic center region, the Arches cluster, the Quintuplet cluster, and the central parsec cluster, each of them rich in young hot stars. With new infrared instruments, this region is no longer obscured for the observer. For understanding these very massive clusters, it is essential to know their stellar inventory. We provide comprehensive spectroscopic data for the stellar population of the Quintuplet cluster that will form the basis of subsequent spectral analyses. Spectroscopic observations of the Quintuplet cluster were obtained with the Integral Field Spectrograph SINFONI-SPIFFI at the ESO-VLT, with the ESO VLT UT4 (Yepun) telescope between May and July 2006. The inner part of the Quintuplet cluster covered by 22 slightly overlapping fields, each of them of 8"x8" in size. The spectral range comprises the near-IR K-band from 1.94 to 2.45um. The 3D data cubes of the individual fields were flux-calibrated and combined to one contiguous cube, from which the spectra of all detectable point sources were extracted.
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