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We have obtained deep JHK imaging of the central region of the NGC 2024 embedded cluster, allowing three-color measurements of 151 sources. We show that contamination by background sources is small, and we reject a small number of sources that are probably foreground. We use a Monte Carlo isochrone tting technique to estimate the luminosities and masses of the low-mass members of the embedded cluster. We nd that the IMF between D0.04 and D0.5 can be tted within the errors M _ with a power law of slope [1.2 in linear mass units (or [0.2 in logarithmic units). There is no indication of a turnover of the IMF at the bottom of the main sequence ; it appears to continue down to D0.04 with no signicant deviation (within our moderately large errors) from the power law. This M _ estimate of the IMF includes only the primary members of binary (or multiple) systems. Of a subset of 35 sources, 24 (69%) appear to have infrared excesses indicating possible circumstellar disks, supporting arguments that disk formation is not inhibited in high-density clusters.
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Comerón et al. (1996) studied this question.
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