Pan-STARRS Photometric and Astrometric Calibration

By E. Magnier, Edward F. Schlafly, Douglas P. Finkbeiner, J. Tonry, B. Goldman, S. Roser, E. Schilbach, K. Chambers, H. Flewelling, M. Huber and 18 more. Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series, 2016

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We present the details of the photometric and astrometric calibration of the Pan-STARRS1 3π Survey. The photometric goals were to reduce the systematic effects introduced by the camera and detectors, and to place all of the observations onto a photometric system with consistent zero-points over the entire area surveyed, the ≈30,000 deg2 north of δ = −30°. Using external comparisons, we demonstrate that the resulting photometric system is consistent across the sky to between 7 and 12.4 mmag depending on the filter. For bright stars, the systematic error floor for individual measurements is (σ g , σ r , σ i , σ z , σ y ) = (14, 14, 15, 15, 18) mmag. The astrometric calibration compensates for similar systematic effects so that positions, proper motions, and parallaxes are reliable as well. The bright-star systematic error floor for individual astrometric measurements is 16 mas. The Pan-STARRS Data Release 2 (DR2) astrometric system is tied to the Gaia DR1 coordinate frame with a systematic uncertainty of ∼5 mas.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Computational Mechanics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/855a7d767ad9b53172583d7ffcc86d5beb30f084

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Citations in the corpus

ATLAS: A High-cadence All-sky Survey System (2018, background): “By tying to Pan-STARRS1 reference stars (Magnier et al. 2016) most observations north of decl.”
The SED Machine: A Robotic Spectrograph for Fast Transient Classification (2017, methodology): “Zeropoint calibration The SEDM photometry is based on the AB system (Oke & Gunn 1983), used by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) (Fukugita et al. 1996) and the PanSTARRS (Magnier et al. 2016) photometric systems.”
The Hubble Constant from Infrared Surface Brightness Fluctuation Distances (2021, methodology): “…sample, we adopt the calibration based on optical color for nearly all galaxies, but instead of ACS colors (unavailable for most of the sample), we use colors derived from Pan-STARRS images (Magnier et al. 2020; Waters et al. 2020), with sky estimation and object masking as in Jensen et al. (2015).”
A compendium of distances to molecular clouds in the Star Formation Handbook (2020, methodology): “For sightlines above a declination δ = −30◦, we use optical point spread function (PSF) photometry from the PanSTARRS1 survey (Magnier et al. 2016; Chambers et al. 2016) and PSF near-infrared photometry from the 2MASS survey (Skrutskie et al. 2006).”
A First Catalog of Variable Stars Measured by the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) (2018, background): “As described in Tonry et al. (2018a), the o and c filters are well-defined photometric bands with known color transformations linking them to the Pan-STARRS g, r, and i bands (Magnier et al. 2016b).”
The ATLAS All-Sky Stellar Reference Catalog (2018, methodology): “We use the PanSTARRS mean photometry (mean of measurements from all images) because it has had ubercal corrections applied (see Schlafly et al. 2012; Magnier et al. 2016c), whereas the corresponding stack photometry has not.”