A method for recovering the star formation history of resolved stellar populations

A new method to extract information from color-magnitude diagrams (CMDs) is presented. We employ a Richardson-Lucy (RL) algorithm to the analysis of the observational uncertainties. The resulting reconstruction is a cleaned data set with which to perform analyses of the star formation history. For this task, synthetic stellar populations are built and compared with the data CMD. As an application, the star formation rate in the solar vicinity is recovered. © 2007 International Astronomical Union