YOUNG OPEN CLUSTERS AS PROBES OF THE STAR-FORMATION PROCESS .2. MASS AND LUMINOSITY FUNCTIONS OF YOUNG OPEN CLUSTERS

This paper is the second in a series devoted to the use of young, opti cally revealed open clusters as probes of the star-formation process. The first paper in the series [Phelps & Janes, ApJS (1993) (in press)] presented the dataset used for the study, and discussed some of the r esults from the survey of 23 open clusters in the Cassipoeia region of the Perseus spiral arm of our Galaxy. This paper presents an analysis of the stellar content of a subset of the clusters, including determi nations of the luminosity and mass functions of 8 of the clusters to a pproximately 1 M.. The slope of the average mass function GAMMA is fou nd to be -1.40 +/- 0.13 over the mass range 1.4 < M/M. < 7.9. Signific ant variations from this average value are found for two of the cluste rs, NGC 581 and NGC 663. Possible structure in the mass functions is d iscussed, as is the degree to which the IMF is universal, or merely an average of many IMFs that differ substantially on the local level.