Old Star Clusters in the FSR catalogue
  We investigate the old star clusters in the sample of cluster candidates from
Froebrich, Scholz & Raftery 2007 -- the FSR list. Based on photometry from the
2-Micron All Sky Survey we generated decontaminated colour-magnitude and
colour-colour diagrams to select a sample of 269 old stellar clusters. This
sample contains 63 known globular clusters, 174 known open clusters and 32 so
far unclassified objects. Isochrone fitting has been used to homogeneously
calculate the age, distance and reddening to all clusters. The mean age of the
open clusters in our sample is 1Gyr. The positions of these clusters in the
Galactic Plane show that 80% of open clusters older than 1Gyr have a
Galactocentric distance of more than 7kpc. The scale height for the old open
clusters above the Plane is 375pc, more than three times as large as the 115pc
which we obtain for the younger open clusters in our sample. We find that the
mean optical extinction towards the open clusters in the disk of the Galaxy is
0.70mag/kpc. The FSR sample has a strong selection bias towards objects with an
apparent core radius of 30" to 50" and there is an unexplained paucity of old
open clusters in the Galactic Longitude range of 120deg < l < 180deg.
