Faint High-Latitude Carbon Stars Discovered by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey: Methods and Initial Results

We report the discovery of 39 Faint High Latitude Carbon Stars (FHLCs) fromSloan Digital Sky Survey commissioning data. The objects, each selectedphotometrically and verified spectroscopically, range over 16.6 < r* < 20.0,and show a diversity of temperatures as judged by both colors and NaD linestrengths. At the completion of the Sloan Survey, there will be many hundredhomogeneously selected and observed FHLCs in this sample. We present propermotion measures for each object, indicating that the sample is a mixture ofextremely distant (>100 kpc) halo giant stars, useful for constraining halodynamics, plus members of the recently-recognized exotic class of very nearbydwarf carbon (dC) stars. Motions, and thus dC classification, are inferred for40-50 percent of the sample, depending on the level of statistical significanceinvoked. The new list of dC stars presented here, although selected from only asmall fraction of the final SDSS, doubles the number of such objects found byall previous methods. (Abstract abridged).Comment: Accepted for publication in The Astronomical Journal, Vol. 124, Sep. 2002, 40 pages, 7 figures, AASTeX v5.