Rotation and Activity in the Solar-Metallicity Open Cluster NGC 2516**Based on observations obtained at the Anglo-Australian Telescope and on observations obtained at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, NOAO, which is operated by the Associated Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA), Inc., under cooperative agreement with the National Science Foundation.

We report new measures of radial velocities and rotation rates (v sin i) for 51 F and early G stars in the open cluster NGC 2516 and combine these with previously published data. From high signal-to-noise ratio spectra of two stars, we show that NGC 2516 has a relative iron abundance with respect to the Pleiades of Δ[Fe/H] = +0.04 ± 0.07 at the canonical reddening of E(B-V) = 0.12, in contrast to previous photometric studies that placed the cluster 0.2-0.4 dex below solar. We construct a color-magnitude diagram based on radial velocity members and explore the sensitivity of photometric determinations of the metallicity and distance to assumed values of the reddening. For a metal abundance near solar, the Hipparcos distance to NGC 2516 is probably underestimated. Finally, we show that the distribution of rotation rates and X-ray emission does not differ greatly from that of the Pleiades, when allowance is made for the somewhat older age of NGC 2516.