Absolute Calibration of the Infrared Array Camera on the Spitzer Space Telescope

By W. Reach, S. Megeath, Marvin L. Cohen, J. Hora, S. Carey, J. Surace, S. Willner, Pauline Barmby, G. Wilson, W. Glaccum and 3 more. 2005

519 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The Infrared Array Camera (IRAC) on the Spitzer Space Telescope is absolutely calibrated by comparing photometry of a set of A stars near the north ecliptic pole to predictions based on ground‐based observations and a stellar atmosphere model. The brightness of point sources is calibrated to an accuracy of 3%, relative to models for A‐star stellar atmospheres, for observations performed and analyzed in the same manner as for the calibration stars. This includes corrections for the location of the star in the array and the location of the centroid within the peak pixel. Long‐term stability of the IRAC photometry was measured by monitoring the brightness of A dwarfs and K giants (near the north ecliptic pole) observed several times per month; the photometry is stable to 1.5% (rms) over a year. Intermediate‐timescale stability of the IRAC photometry was measured by monitoring at least one secondary calibrator (near the ecliptic plane) every 12 hr while IRAC was in nominal operations; the intermediate‐term photometry is stable, with a 1% dispersion (rms). One of the secondary calibrators was found to have significantly time‐variable (5%) mid‐infrared emission, with a period (7.4 days) matching the optical light curve; it is possibly a Cepheid variable.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Instrumentation

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Citations in the corpus

A NEW CLASS OF LUMINOUS TRANSIENTS AND A FIRST CENSUS OF THEIR MASSIVE STELLAR PROGENITORS (2008, methodology): “In order to convert MIR and optical magnitudes to fluxes, we used zeropoints in Reach et al. (2005) and Cohen et al. (2003) for the EAGBs and LBV candidates, respectively.”
SURVEYING THE AGENTS OF GALAXY EVOLUTION IN THE TIDALLY STRIPPED, LOW METALLICITY SMALL MAGELLANIC CLOUD (SAGE-SMC). I. OVERVIEW (2011, methodology): “The pipeline starts with flux calibrated IRAC frames (Reach et al. 2005) provided by the Spitzer Science Center (SSC).”
RECONSTRUCTING THE STELLAR MASS DISTRIBUTIONS OF GALAXIES USING S4G IRAC 3.6 AND 4.5 μm IMAGES. II. THE CONVERSION FROM LIGHT TO MASS (2014, methodology): “To convert from 3.6 µm luminosity to magnitude we use the IRAC channel 1 zero-point calibration provided by Reach et al. (2005) (280.9 Jy; for channel 2 the zeropoint is 179.7 Jy).”
A T8.5 BROWN DWARF MEMBER OF THE ξ URSAE MAJORIS SYSTEM (2012, background): “The Infrared Array Camera (IRAC) (Fazio et al. 2004) onboard the Spitzer Space Telescope employs 256×256-pixel detector arrays to image a field of view of 5.”
The Absolute Magnitude of the Sun in Several Filters (2018, methodology): “…(2008) is called mean energy wavelength by Bessell & Murphy (2012) : λn1 = ∫ R(λ)λ2dλ ∫ R(λ)λdλ (A3) 11 while Reach et al. (2005) define the nominal wavelength as λn2 = ∫ R(λ)dλ ∫ R(λ)dλ λ (A4) and in both cases minimize the color correction in a given band (Reach et al. 2005; Rieke et al. 2008).”
A SPITZER SURVEY OF YOUNG STELLAR CLUSTERS WITHIN ONE KILOPARSEC OF THE SUN: CLUSTER CORE EXTRACTION AND BASIC STRUCTURAL ANALYSIS (2009, methodology): “These values are derived from the calibration effort presented in Reach et al. (2005), and they include standard corrections for the aperture sizes chosen.”
Absolute Calibration and Characterization of the Multiband Imaging Photometer for Spitzer. I. The Stellar Calibrator Sample and the 24 μm Calibration (2007, methodology): “…Spitzer Space Telescope (Werner et al. 2004) are calibrated against celestial sources: for example, the Infrared Array Camera (IRAC; Fazio et al. 2004), with photometric bands from ∼ 3− 8 µm, is calibrated against stars (Reach et al. 2005), as is the Infrared Spectrograph (IRS; Houck et al. 2004).”
SEDS: THE SPITZER EXTENDED DEEP SURVEY. SURVEY DESIGN, PHOTOMETRY, AND DEEP IRAC SOURCE COUNTS (2013, background): “It combines contributions from three separate sources of uncertainty: (1) the 3% uncertainty in the IRAC absolute calibration (Reach et al. 2005), (2) photon noise, and (3) confusion noise.”
The Behavior of the Aromatic Features in M101 H II Regions: Evidence for Dust Processing (2008, methodology): “The IRAC absolute calibration uncertainties are taken as 5% which is larger than the point source uncertainty of ∼2% (Reach et al. 2005) as the IRAC scattered light behavior makes the extended source calibration less accurate.”
The Dust Cloud around the White Dwarf G29-38 (2005, methodology): “We extracted our photometry using the method (Reach et al. 2005) used for the IRAC calibration stars.”
EXTENDING THE NEARBY GALAXY HERITAGE WITH WISE: FIRST RESULTS FROM THE WISE ENHANCED RESOLUTION GALAXY ATLAS (2012, background): “Similar to the Spitzer aperture correction (Reach et al. 2005), for large aperture measurements of WISE images the resulting integrated fluxes must be reduced by a small amount to be consistent with the standard photometric calibration.”
Spitzer SAGE Survey of the Large Magellanic Cloud. II. Evolved Stars and Infrared Color-Magnitude Diagrams (2006, methodology): “The diagrams in this paper use IRAC and MIPS photometry converted to magnitudes using the following zero points (Reach et al. 2005; C. Engelbracht et al. 2006, in preparation): [3.6] zero mag = 280.9 Jy, k0 ¼ 3:55 m; [8.0] zero mag = 64.13 Jy, k0 ¼ 7:872 m; and [24] zero mag = 7.15 Jy, k0 ¼ 23:68…”
Circumstellar Debris and Pollution at White Dwarf Stars (2016, methodology): “Inspired by the work of Probst and armed with a rapidly evolving set of detectors at the NASA Infrared Telescope Facility (IRTF), Zuckerman & Becklin (1987) identified the first white dwarf with infrared excess emission that was not associated with a stellar companion; G29-38.”
The Spitzer/IRAC view of black hole–bulge scaling relations (2010, methodology): “…bulge properties and verify the reliability of our analysis, we adopt the relation found by JI08: logRe = 1.55× log σ − 0.89× log < Ie > −9.89, (1) 3 To compute the magnitudes at 3.6 µm we adopt a zero point of 17.25 in Vega magnitudes, according to the IRAC photometric system (Reach et al. 2005).”
Techniques and Review of Absolute Flux Calibration from the Ultraviolet to the Mid-Infrared (2014, unknown): “In addition to the nominal wavelength λo of Reach et al. (2005), other common definitions are the mean and effective wavelengths λmean ¼ R λRdλR Rdλ ; (8) λeff ¼ R F λλ2RdλR F λλRdλ : (9) Perhaps, most useful is the source independent pivotwavelength λp and associated pivot-frequency νp, where λpνp…”
ANDROMEDA'S DUST (2013, unknown): “This will be problematic in 9 IRAC images in bands 1–4 were multiplied by extended source calibration factors 0.91, 0.94, 0.66, 0.74 (Reach et al. 2005).”
DIRECT OXYGEN ABUNDANCES FOR LOW-LUMINOSITY LVL GALAXIES (2012, methodology): “…from the 4.5 µm IRAC photometry presented in Dale et al. (2009) were calculated using M[4.5] = −2.5 log F[4.5](d/10) 2 179.7 , (1) where F[4.5] is the 4.5 µm flux in Janskys, d is the distance in parsecs, and 179.7 is the zero point flux in Janksys for the 4.5 µm IRAC band (Reach et al. 2005).”