Positions of the GC candidates with respect to the center of the galaxy. The plot shows the declination and right ascension of the sources, where the center of NGC 4709 (blue point) is located at (Δδ, Δα)=(0, 0). The blue circle defines the limit used to define the GCS of NGC 4709. The green rectangle represents the ∼77.22 arcmin² region where the contamination level from background objects was calculated, the cyan point is the position of the center of NGC 4696, and the red rectangle is the ∼20.89 arcmin² region between NGC 4709 and NGC 4696 for which we calculated the luminosity function in Sect. 7. The field-of-view is of 26.91 × 26.40 arcmin².