English

Hypercalibration: A Pan-STARRS1-based recalibration of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey

Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics 2016-05-25 v1

Abstract

We present a recalibration of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) photometry with new flat fields and zero points derived from Pan-STARRS1 (PS1). Using PSF photometry of 60 million stars with 16<r<2016 < r < 20, we derive a model of amplifier gain and flat-field corrections with per-run RMS residuals of 3 millimagnitudes (mmag) in grizgriz bands and 15 mmag in uu band. The new photometric zero points are adjusted to leave the median in the Galactic North unchanged for compatibility with previous SDSS work. We also identify transient non-photometric periods in SDSS ("contrails") based on photometric deviations co-temporal in SDSS bands. The recalibrated stellar PSF photometry of SDSS and PS1 has an RMS difference of {9,7,7,8} mmag in grizgriz, respectively, when averaged over 1515' regions.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1512.01214,
  title  = {Hypercalibration: A Pan-STARRS1-based recalibration of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey},
  author = {Douglas P. Finkbeiner and Edward F. Schlafly and David J. Schlegel and Nikhil Padmanabhan and Mario Juric and William S. Burgett and Kenneth C. Chambers and Larry Denneau and Peter W. Draper and Heather Flewelling and Klaus W. Hodapp and Nick Kaiser and E. A. Magnier and N. Metcalfe and Jeffrey S. Morgan and Paul A. Price and Christopher W. Stubbs and John L. Tonry},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1512.01214},
  year   = {2016}
}

Comments

13 pages, 7 figures, ApJ, in press. "Hypercalibration" refers to using repeat measurements of many stars from multiple surveys to constrain calibration parameters