Abstract details

Whereas the study of local group dwarf galaxies and other Milky Way satellites through their stellar populations is a well-established field, this is much less the case for the Milky Way itself. The reason for this is of course the necessity of large surveys yielding high-quality photometric and spectroscopic data for large numbers of stars all over the sky. With the advent of wide-field CCD camera's and dedicated surveys, such as the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), this has only become feasible in recent years. In this talk two applications of our knowledge of stellar populations to the study of Milky Way structure will be presented. For the first, colour-magnitude diagram (CMD) fitting techniques have been used to study the so-called Canis Major stellar overdensity at low galactic latitude. Using a large survey with the ESO Wide Field Imager, the 3 dimensional structure and star formation history have been determined. In the second, we apply CMD-fitting techniques to data from SDSS to look for substructure in the outer halo.