A Comprehensive HST BVI Catalogue Of Star Clusters In Five Hickson
  Compact Groups Of Galaxies
  We present a photometric catalogue of star cluster candidates in Hickson
compact groups (HCGs) 7, 31, 42, 59, and 92, based on observations with the
Advanced Camera for Surveys and the Wide Field Camera 3 on the Hubble Space
Telescope. The catalogue contains precise cluster positions (right ascension
and declination), magnitudes, and colours in the BVI filters. The number of
detected sources ranges from 2200 to 5600 per group, from which we construct
the high-confidence sample by applying a number of criteria designed to reduce
foreground and background contaminants. Furthermore, the high-confidence
cluster candidates for each of the 16 galaxies in our sample are split into two
sub-populations: one that may contain young star clusters and one that is
dominated by globular older clusters. The ratio of young star cluster to
globular cluster candidates varies from group to group, from equal numbers to
the extreme of HCG 31 which has a ratio of 8 to 1, due to a recent starburst
induced by interactions in the group. We find that the number of blue clusters
with $M_V < -9$ correlates well with the current star formation rate in an
individual galaxy, while the number of globular cluster candidates with $M_V <
-7.8$ correlates well (though with large scatter) with the stellar mass.
Analyses of the high-confidence sample presented in this paper show that star
clusters can be successfully used to infer the gross star formation history of
the host groups and therefore determine their placement in a proposed
evolutionary sequence for compact galaxy groups.
