Blanco DECam Bulge Survey (BDBS) Early Science Results: Red Clump Metallicities

The Blanco DECam Bulge Survey (BDBS) used the 3 sq. degree Dark Energy Camera to image > 200 contiguous square degrees of the Southern Galactic bulge in order to better understand its structure, formation, and chemical enrichment history.  The catalog contains PSF photometry and astrometry for ~250 million sources in all 6 bands.  Early science results show that the u-i color index is a strong metallicity indicator for red clump stars, and that the red clump exhibits a complex photometric morphology.  The resulting metallicity distribution functions show a dramatic change from a unimodal, but long-tailed, distribution close to the plane to a bimodal metal-poor distribution at higher latitudes.