SIMBAD references

We present near-infrared J, H, and K images of four embedded stellar clusters in the Galaxy. We find a significant fraction of pre-main-sequence stars present in at least one of the clusters. For the clusters dominated by main-sequence stars, we determine the initial mass function (IMF) both by using the K luminosity function and a global extinction correction and by deriving individual extinction corrections for each star based on their placement in the K versus H-K color-magnitude diagram. Based on our IMFs we find a significant discrepancy between the mean IMF derived via the different methods, suggesting that taking individual extinctions into account is necessary to correctly derive the IMF for an embedded cluster.