but due to crowding these stars are not accessible to ground-based spectroscopy. UV data are available for the blue hook stars in the outer region of $\omega$ Cen from the Ultraviolet Imaging Telescope (UIT, Stecher et al. [@stec97]), but unfortunately, these data are too noisy to permit a quantitative test.

Considering these somewhat ambiguous results and the fact that $\omega$ Cen is not a typical globular cluster, we decided to test the late hot flasher scenario by observing the more typical globular cluster NGC 2808. We discuss our observational data in Sect. \[sec-observ\] and then derive the parameters of the blue hook stars (temperatures, gravities and helium abundances) in Sect. \[sec-analysis\]. In Sect. \[sec-discuss\] we compare our results with the predictions of the flash-mixing scenario.

Observations and Data Reduction\[sec-observ\]
=============================================

Target Selection
----------------

Our spectroscopic targets were selected from the catalog of Walker ([@walk99]; Fig.\[cmd\]), and include seven stars brighter than the gap at V $\approx$ , and twelve stars fainter than the gap. The coordinates and photometry for our targets are given in Table \[ngc2808\_par\], along with cross-identifications from the catalog of Bedin et al. ([@bepi00]).

[ll|llllll|l]{} $\alpha_{2000}$ & $\delta_{2000}$ & & & m$_{1520}$\
& & & $V$ & 