A&A 415, 531–547 (2004) Astronomy DOI: 10.1051/0004-6361:20034634 & c ESO 2004 Astrophysics The effect of metallicity on the Cepheid Period-Luminosity relation from a Baade-Wesselink analysis of Cepheids in the Galaxy and in the Small Magellanic Cloud, J. Storm1,B.W.Carney2, W. P. Gieren3, P. Fouqu´e4,5,D.W.Latham6,andA.M.Fry2 1 Astrophysikalisches Institut Potsdam, An der Sternwarte 16, 14482 Potsdam, Germany e-mail:
[email protected] 2 Univ. of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Dept. of Physics and Astronomy, Phillips Hall, Chapel Hill, NC-27599-3255, USA e-mail:
[email protected],
[email protected] 3 Universidad de Concepci´on, Departamento de F´ısica, Casilla 160-C, Concepci´on, Chile e-mail:
[email protected] 4 Observatoire de Paris, LESIA, 5, place Jules Janssen, 92195 Meudon Cedex, France 5 European Southern Observatory, Casilla 19001, Santiago 19, Chile e-mail:
[email protected] 6 Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, 60 Garden Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA e-mail:
[email protected] Received 5 August 2003 / Accepted 14 November 2003 Abstract. We have applied the near-IR Barnes-Evans realization of the Baade-Wesselink method as calibrated by Fouqu´e& Gieren (1997) to five metal-poor Cepheids with periods between 13 and 17 days in the Small Magellanic Cloud as well as to a sample of 34 Galactic Cepheids to determine the effect of metallicity on the period-luminosity (P-L) relation. For ten of the Galactic Cepheids we present new accurate and well sampled radial-velocity curves.