1997A&A...320..776L

We present new tidal radii for seven Galactic globular clusters using the method of automated star counts on Schmidt plates of the Tautenburg, Palomar and UK telescopes. The plates were fully scanned with the APM system in Cambridge (UK). Special account was given to a reliable background subtraction and the correction of crowding effects in the central cluster region. For the latter we used a new kind of crowding correction based on a statistical approach to the distribution of stellar images and the luminosity function of the cluster stars in the uncrowded area. The star counts were correlated with surface brightness profiles of different authors to obtain complete projected density profiles of the globular clusters. Fitting an empirical density law (King 1962AJ.....67..471K) we derived the following structural parameters: tidal radius r_t, core radius r_c and concentration parameter c. In the cases of NGC 5466, M 5, M 12, M 13 and M 15 we found an indication for a tidal tail around these objects (cf. Grillmair et al., 1995AJ....109.2553G).