A study of the two northern open clusters NGC 1582 and NGC 1663

We present CCD $UBV(I)_C$ observations obtained in the field of the previously unstudied northern open clusters NGC 1582 and NGC 1663. For the former, we also provide high-resolution spectra of the brightest stars and complement our data with Two-Micron All-Sky-Survey (2MASS) near-infrared photometry and with astrometric data from the Tycho-2 catalog. From the analysis of all these data, we argue that NGC 1582 is a very poor, quite large and heavily contaminated open cluster. It turns out to have a reddening $E_{B-V} = 0.35 \pm 0.03$, to be situated $1100 \pm 100$ pc from the Sun and to have an age of $300 \pm 100$ Myr. On the other hand, we were not able to unambiguously clarify the nature of NGC 1663. By assuming it is a real cluster and from the analysis of its photometric diagrams, we found a color excess value $E_{B-V} = 0.20$, an intermediate age value ($\sim 2000$ Myr) and a distance of about 700 pc. The distribution of the stars in the region however suggests we are probably facing an open cluster remnant. As an additional result, we obtained aperture photometry of three previously unclassified galaxies placed in the field of NGC 1663 and performed a preliminary morphological classification of them.