HST IMAGING OF THE LARGE MAGELLANIC CLOUD - THE FIELD-STAR POPULATION NEAR 30-DORADUS

We present deep color-magnitude diagrams for two fields in the Large Magellanic Cloud, located about 6 arcmin from 30 Doradus. The data are from images taken with the Hubble Space Telescope's Wide Field Camera, as part of the Medium Deep Survey Key Project. We describe a procedure for measuring stellar magnitudes in relatively crowded HST images based on aperture corrections. This procedure is used to obtain color-magnitude diagrams containing a total of approximately 7200 stars with 18<V<24. The color-magnitude diagrams show a well-populated main sequence, and a pronounced giant branch concentrated at V-20. There is tentative evidence for a population of low-metallicity main-sequence stars, which may confirm the suggestion that the LMC has, like spiral galaxies, a metal-poor, spheroidal component.