Optical and near IR photometry of globular clusters in two elliptical galaxies in Fornax: NGC 1316 and NGC 1399.

We have obtained deep near-IR images of globular cluster systems associated with two giant elliptical galaxies in the Fornax cluster: NGC 1316 (Fornax A), which is an obvious merger remnant, and the central galaxy of the cluster NGC 1399, which features a cooling flow. The near-IR photometry is complemented with deep WFPC2 Hubble Space Telescope (HST) imaging, a unique combination for studying globular clusters in nearby galaxies. The clusters are selected on the basis of their structural parameters (observed core diameters and ellipticities), as measured from HST images. The addition of near-IR photometry obtained with IRAC2B at the ESO/MPI 2.2-m telescope allows us to produce color-magnitude and color-color diagrams for the star cluster systems of both galaxies.