MEASURING REDDENING WITH SLOAN DIGITAL SKY SURVEY STELLAR SPECTRA AND RECALIBRATING SFD

By Edward F. Schlafly, Douglas P. Finkbeiner. 2010

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We present measurements of dust reddening using the colors of stars with spectra in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. We measure reddening as the difference between the measured and predicted colors of a star, as derived from stellar parameters from the Sloan Extension for Galactic Understanding and Exploration Stellar Parameter Pipeline. We achieve uncertainties of 56, 34, 25, and 29 mmag in the colors u − g, g − r, r − i, and i − z, per star, though the uncertainty varies depending on the stellar type and the magnitude of the star. The spectrum-based reddening measurements confirm our earlier “blue tip” reddening measurements, finding reddening coefficients different by −3%, 1%, 1%, and 2% in u − g, g − r, r − i, and i − z from those found by the blue tip method, after removing a 4% normalization difference. These results prefer an RV = 3.1 Fitzpatrick reddening law to O'Donnell or Cardelli et al. reddening laws. We provide a table of conversion coefficients from the Schlegel et al. (SFD) maps of E(B − V) to extinction in 88 bandpasses for four values of RV, using this reddening law and the 14% recalibration of SFD first reported by Schlafly et al. and confirmed in this work.

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Citations in the corpus

• STELLAR AND PLANETARY PROPERTIES OF K2 CAMPAIGN 1 CANDIDATES AND VALIDATION OF 17 PLANETS, INCLUDING A PLANET RECEIVING EARTH-LIKE INSOLATION (2015, methodology): “The NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database, which reports the Schlafly & Finkbeiner (2011) recalibration of the Schlegel et al. (1998) extinction map as measured by COBE/ DIRBE and IRAS/ISSA, suggests that typical AV extinction values to the edge of the galaxy at this high Galactic latitude are ∼0.1 mag,…”
• THE STAR FORMATION HISTORIES OF LOCAL GROUP DWARF GALAXIES. I. HUBBLE SPACE TELESCOPE/WIDE FIELD PLANETARY CAMERA 2 OBSERVATIONS (2014, methodology): “Therefore while the Schlafly & Finkbeiner (2011) value is an average in that direction of the sky, the HST observations targeted a low extinction window toward IC 10, which provides a qualitative reason for the difference.”
• Constraining the thick disc formation scenario of the Milky Way (2014, unknown): “We did consider the maps of Schlegel et al. (1998) because they only give the 2D extinction value integrated over lines of sight and might suffer from systematics, as shown by Dobashi et al. (2005), and more recently by Schlafly & Finkbeiner (2011), and by Berry et al. (2012) using SDSS data.”
• Multi-messenger observations of a binary neutron star merger (2017, unknown): “) mag; Schlafly & Finkbeiner 2011).”
• THE SPATIAL STRUCTURE OF MONO-ABUNDANCE SUB-POPULATIONS OF THE MILKY WAY DISK (2011, methodology): “…respectively, using the reddening maps of Schlegel et al. (1998); as we only use lines of sight with relatively small extinction and we do not use the SDSS u band, using the improved reddening maps of Schlafly & Finkbeiner (2011) leads to insignificant differences for the purpose of our analysis.”
• The Pristine survey - I. Mining the Galaxy for the most metal-poor stars (2017, methodology): “As a final step of the data reduction process, we deredden the data following the Schlafly & Finkbeiner (2011) recalibration of the Schlegel, Finkbeiner & Davis (1998) maps.”
• The Hubble Constant from Infrared Surface Brightness Fluctuation Distances (2021, methodology): “We correct the photometry for Galactic extinction according to Schlafly & Finkbeiner (2011), using the values provided for individual galaxies by the NASA Extragalactic Database (NED).”
• A LARGE CATALOG OF ACCURATE DISTANCES TO MOLECULAR CLOUDS FROM PS1 PHOTOMETRY (2014, methodology): “However, we have found that the SFD map can have a scale error of about 10% that varies from cloud to cloud in the sky (Schlafly et al. 2010; Schlafly & Finkbeiner 2011), and we find below that N can vary between 0.5 and 1.2 in the clouds studied in this work (Section 4).”
• GRB hosts through cosmic time - VLT/X-Shooter emission-line spectroscopy of 96 γ-ray-burst-selected galaxies at 0.1 (2015, methodology): “All fluxes, spectra, and photometry are corrected for the Galactic foreground reddening according to Schlafly & Finkbeiner (2011) assuming RV = 3.08 (Pei 1992).”
• The Electromagnetic Counterpart of the Binary Neutron Star Merger LIGO/Virgo GW170817. II. UV, Optical, and Near-infrared Light Curves and Comparison to Kilonova Models (2017, methodology): “)E B V 0.105, applying the calibration of Schlafly & Finkbeiner (2011).”