The Spitzer survey of interstellar clouds in the Gould Belt. II. The
  Cepheus Flare observed with IRAC and MIPS
  We present Spitzer IRAC (~2 deg^2) and MIPS (~8 deg^2) observations of the
Cepheus Flare which is associated with the Gould Belt, at an approximate
distance of ~300 pc. Around 6500 sources are detected in all four IRAC bands,
of which ~900 have MIPS 24 micron detections. We identify 133 YSO candidates
using color-magnitude diagram techniques, a large number of the YSO candidates
are associated with the NGC 7023 reflection nebula. Cross identifications were
made with the Guide Star Catalog II and the IRAS Faint Source Catalog, and
spectral energy distributions (SED) were constructed. SED modeling was
conducted to estimate the degree of infrared excess. It was found that a large
majority of disks were optically thick accreting disks, suggesting that there
has been little disk evolution in these sources. Nearest-neighbor clustering
analysis identified four small protostellar groups (L1228, L1228N, L1251A, and
L1251B) with 5-15 members each and the larger NGC 7023 association with 32 YSO
members. The star formation efficiency for cores with clusters of protostars
and for those without clusters was found to be ~8% and ~1% respectively. The
cores L1155, L1241, and L1247 are confirmed to be starless down to our
luminosity limit of L_bol=0.06 L_sol.
