The (V,V − I_c) color–magnitude diagram of stars in the γ Vel cluster region observed with Giraffe and with S/N> 15. Here and in all following figures color-coded symbols are consistently used: blue crosses are candidate cluster members, cyan dots are A to early-G stars, red dots are late-K and M stars, and orange and gray dots are the remaining stars; see Sect. 4.1 for details. Stars with wide Hα emission are indicated with green circles. The unreddened ZAMS from Siess et al. (2000) at the cluster distance is shown as a blue dashed line. The large arrow indicate a reddening vector for A_V = 1, while the small arrow indicates the low estimated reddening for the cluster. In the top axis, spectral types corresponding to unreddened main-sequence stars are indicated.