The stellar population and metallicity distribution of the Sombrero
  galaxy
  Hubble Space Telescope studies of the resolved stellar population of
elliptical galaxies have shown that the galaxies form by steady accretion of
gas which is all the while forming stars and evolving chemically to a
metallicity distribution that is as high as solar composition in the most
massive objects that have been analyzed, and much lower for low mass
ellipticals. In this paper we study for the first time the stellar content of
an early type spiral galaxy, the massive disk galaxy, the Sombrero, NGC 4594.
We consider whether the metallicity distribution function (MDF) in the observed
field matches that of elliptical galaxies of some luminosity, and what these
data imply for the accretion and enrichment model that can be fitted to the
MDF. The MDF of NGC 4594 is similar to that of the elliptical galaxy of similar
luminosity, NGC 5128. The field we are probing is a combination of the galaxy's
bulge and halo.
