Sloan Digital Sky Survey Standard Star Catalog for Stripe 82: The Dawn of Industrial 1% Optical Photometry

By Željko Ivezic´, J. A. Smith, G. Miknaitis, Huan Lin, Douglas L. Tucker, Robert Lupton, James E. Gunn, G. Knapp, Michael A. Strauss, B. Sesar and 21 more. 2007

270 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We describe a standard star catalog constructed using multiple SDSS photometric observations (at least four per band, with a median of 10) in the ugriz system. The catalog includes 1.01 million nonvariable unresolved objects from the equatorial stripe 82 (|δJ2000.0| < 1.266°) in the right ascension range 20h34m-4h00m and with the corresponding r-band (approximately Johnson V-band) magnitudes in the range 14-22. The distributions of measurements for individual sources demonstrate that the photometric pipeline correctly estimates random photometric errors, which are below 0.01 mag for stars brighter than 19.5, 20.5, 20.5, 20, and 18.5 in ugriz, respectively (about twice as good as for individual SDSS runs). Several independent tests of the internal consistency suggest that the spatial variation of photometric zero points is not larger than ∼0.01 mag (rms). In addition to being the largest available data set with optical photometry internally consistent at the ∼1% level, this catalog provides a practical definition of the SDSS photometric system. Using this catalog, we show that photometric zero points for SDSS observing runs can be calibrated within a nominal uncertainty of 2% even for data obtained through 1 mag thick clouds, and we demonstrate the existence of He and H white dwarf sequences using photometric data alone. Based on the properties of this catalog, we conclude that upcoming large-scale optical surveys such as the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope will be capable of delivering robust 1% photometry for billions of sources.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8a135cb3bcfb4f258df5c46c578700d53e89bede

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Astronomy and Astrophysics

Citations in the corpus

An Improved Photometric Calibration of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Imaging Data (2007, background): “While the Fall equatorial stripe has sufficient repeat observations to make precise photometry possible (Ivezić et al. 2007), the calibration for the bulk of the survey region would only be constrained at the survey poles, clearly undesirable.”
THE DEEP2 GALAXY REDSHIFT SURVEY: DESIGN, OBSERVATIONS, DATA REDUCTION, AND REDSHIFTS (2012, background): “Fields 3 and 4 are also in the multiply observed Equatorial Strip (Stripe 82) of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS, York et al. 2000, Adelman-McCarthy et al. 2007, Ivezic et al. 2007), and are visible from both northern 9 and southern hemispheres.”
A SURVEY OF z ∼ 6 QUASARS IN THE SLOAN DIGITAL SKY SURVEY DEEP STRIPE. II. DISCOVERY OF SIX QUASARS AT zAB>21 (2009, methodology): “Finally we applied aperture correction to a large aperture using standard stars in the same field (Ivezić et al. 2007), and corrected for Galactic extinction using Schlegel, Finkbeiner, & Davis (1998).”
Gaia broad band photometry (2010, background): “All the data concerning the passbands can be found in Ivezić et al. (2007).”
Synthetic stellar photometry – I. General considerations and new transformations for broad-band systems (2014, background): “While broad-band photometry can be easily used to map and study extended stellar populations and/or large fractions of the sky, also at faint magnitudes (e.g., Stetson et al. 1998; Bedin et al. 2004; Ivezić et al. 2007; Saito c© 0000 RAS ar X iv :1 40 7.”
THE SEVENTH DATA RELEASE OF THE SLOAN DIGITAL SKY SURVEY (2008, methodology): “…in instrumental zero-point is effectively corrected by the photometric calibration for objects near the mean color of the standard stars, and, in fact, the repeat photometry of stars in stripe 82 is stable with time for stars with −0.5 < g − r < 1.5 (Bramich et al. 2008; Ivezić et al. 2007).”
The All-Sky Automated Survey for Supernovae (ASAS-SN) Light Curve Server v1.0 (2017, background): “…China 8 US Department of Energy Computational Science Graduate Fellow 9 ASC Technology, College of Arts and Science, The Ohio State University, 125 S. Oval Mall, Columbus, OH 43235 10 Warsaw University Observatory, Al Ujazdowskie 4, 00-478Warsaw, Poland Stripe 82 (SDSS, Ivezić et al. 2007).”
SUPERNOVA CONSTRAINTS AND SYSTEMATIC UNCERTAINTIES FROM THE FIRST THREE YEARS OF THE SUPERNOVA LEGACY SURVEY (2011, methodology): “The SDSS SN relative calibration is based on the catalog of Ivezić et al. (2007), and tied to an absolute calibration (AB) via observations of three solar-analog stars with high-quality CALSPEC SEDs.”
The Fifth Data Release of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (2007, background): “Figure 3, based on the stripe 82 stellar catalog of Ivezić et al. (2007), demonstrates this improvement, showing the g r versus u g color-color diagram for blue, nonvariable point sources (mostly white dwarfs) in stripe 82.”
Light and motion in SDSS Stripe 82: The catalogues (2008, background): “By averaging a subset of the repeated observations of unresolved sources in Stripe 82, Ivezić et al. (2007) built a standard star catalogue containing ∼1 million nonvariable sources withr band magnitudes in the range 14-22, by far the deepest and most numerous set of photometric standards…”
Further calibration of the Swift ultraviolet/optical telescope (2010, methodology): “To test the accuracy of the distortion correction, we computed astrometric solutions for 30 images using high-precision star positions from the Stripe 82 subset of the Sloan survey (Ivezic et al. 2007) and from the Stetson, McClure & VandenBerg (2004) catalogue of the open cluster NGC 188.”
THE BLANCO COSMOLOGY SURVEY: DATA ACQUISITION, PROCESSING, CALIBRATION, QUALITY DIAGNOSTICS, AND DATA RELEASE (2012, methodology): “The constancy of the stellar locus has been used as a cross check of the photometric calibration within the SDSS survey (Ivezić et al. 2007).”
THE SDSS-III BARYON OSCILLATION SPECTROSCOPIC SURVEY: THE QUASAR LUMINOSITY FUNCTION FROM DATA RELEASE NINE (2012, background): “…data are beneficial for quasar target selection for two reasons: (i) the improved photometry of the deeper data better defines the stellar locus (Ivezić et al. 2007) and (ii) quasars can be selected based on their variability (Sesar et al. 2007; Bramich et al. 2008; Schmidt et al. 2010;…”
THE SLOAN DIGITAL SKY SURVEY COADD: 275 deg2 OF DEEP SLOAN DIGITAL SKY SURVEY IMAGING ON STRIPE 82 (2011, methodology): “The resulting photometric calibration of a given run is good to 0.02 mag in up to 1 mag of atmospheric extinction (see also Ivezić et al. (2007) for a discussion of calibration through clouds).”
PROBING THE OUTER GALACTIC HALO WITH RR LYRAE FROM THE CATALINA SURVEYS (2012, methodology): “This is a slightly different transformation than used with the BHB sample, since Ivezic et al. (2007) note that their calibration is not appropriate for BHB star colours.”
SEGUE: A SPECTROSCOPIC SURVEY OF 240,000 STARS WITH g = 14–20 (2009, background): “The main locus, from the accurate averaged photometry from Stripe 82 (Ivezić et al. 2007) is shown in gray: stars with l-color greater than 0.07 are shown in light gray.”
The second data release of the INT Photometric Hα Survey of the Northern Galactic Plane (IPHAS DR2) (2014, methodology): “…PanSTARRS surveys could benefit from revisiting regions in their footprint to carry out a so-called UBERCALIBRATION5 procedure, in which repeat measurements of stars in different nights are used to fit the calibration parameters (Ivezić et al. 2007; Padmanabhan et al. 2008; Schlafly et al. 2012).”
PHOTOMETRIC CALIBRATION OF THE FIRST 1.5 YEARS OF THE PAN-STARRS1 SURVEY (2012, background): “Additionally, the width of the stellar locus is about 1% in certain color combinations (Ivezić et al. 2007), requiring an equally good calibration to allow stars to be photometrically identified most accurately.”
PHOTOMETRIC RESPONSE FUNCTIONS OF THE SLOAN DIGITAL SKY SURVEY IMAGER (2010, background): “When one is interested in sub-percent accuracy photometry, separate treatments of Camcols are desired (Ivezić et al. 2007).”