SDSS Standard Star Catalog for Stripe 82: the Dawn of Industrial 1% Optical Photometry

Abstract

We describe a standard star catalog constructed using multiple SDSS photometric observations (at least four per band, with a median of ten) in the $ugriz$ system. The catalog includes 1.01 million non-variable unresolved objects from the equatorial stripe 82 ($|{\delta }_{J2000}|<$ 1.266${}^{\circ }$) in the RA range 20h 34m to 4h 00m, 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, 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 zeropoints is not larger than $\sim$0.01 mag (rms). In addition to being the largest available dataset with optical photometry internally consistent at the $\sim$1% level, this catalog provides practical definition of the SDSS photometric system. Using this catalog, we show that photometric zeropoints for SDSS observing runs can be calibrated within nominal uncertainty of 2% even for data obtained through 1 mag thick clouds, and 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.

63 pages, 24 figures, submitted to AJ, version with correct figures and catalog available from http://www.astro.washington.edu/ivezic/sdss/catalogs/stripe82.html

References in corpus (2)

• The 2.5 m Telescope of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey
• Toward 1% Photometry: End-to-end Calibration of Astronomical Telescopes and Detectors

Cited by in corpus (116)

• The Sixteenth Data Release of the Sloan Digital Sky Surveys: First Release from the APOGEE-2 Southern Survey and Full Release of eBOSS Spectra
• The All-Sky Automated Survey for Supernovae (ASAS-SN) Light Curve Server v1.0
• Supernova Constraints and Systematic Uncertainties from the First 3 Years of the Supernova Legacy Survey
• Gaia Early Data Release 3: Photometric content and validation
• Modeling the Time Variability of SDSS Stripe 82 Quasars as a Damped Random Walk
• The Milky Way Tomography with SDSS: II. Stellar Metallicity
• The Sloan Digital Sky Survey-II Supernova Survey: Technical Summary
• Synthetic Stellar Photometry - I. General considerations and new transformations for broad-band systems
• Paper II: Calibration of the Swift ultraviolet/optical telescope
• The Blanco Cosmology Survey: Data Acquisition, Processing, Calibration, Quality Diagnostics and Data Release
• The Sloan Digital Sky Survey-II Supernova Survey: Search Algorithm and Follow-up Observations
• Think Outside the Color Box: Probabilistic Target Selection and the SDSS-XDQSO Quasar Targeting Catalog
• The Size Distributions of Asteroid Families in the SDSS Moving Object Catalog 4
• The Second Data Release of the INT Photometric H-Alpha Survey of the Northern Galactic Plane (IPHAS DR2)
• The Search for Failed Supernovae with The Large Binocular Telescope: First Candidates
• Light and Motion in SDSS Stripe 82: The Catalogues
• M Dwarfs in SDSS Stripe 82: Photometric Light Curves and Flare Rate Analysis
• Understanding extreme quasar optical variability with CRTS: I. Major AGN flares
• Gaia Data Release 3: All-sky classification of 12.4 million variable sources into 25 classes
• Limitations on the recovery of the true AGN variability parameters using Damped Random Walk modeling
• The Sloan Digital Sky Survey Stripe 82 Imaging Data: Depth-Optimized Co-adds Over 300 Deg^2 in Five Filters
• Quasar Selection Based on Photometric Variability
• Variable Emission from a Gaseous Disc around a Metal-Polluted White Dwarf
• Improving Damped Random Walk parameters for SDSS Stripe 82 Quasars with Pan-STARRS1
• Gaia Data Release 3: The Galaxy in your preferred colours. Synthetic photometry from Gaia low-resolution spectra
• Ensemble Properties of Comets in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey
• Exploring the Local Milky Way: M Dwarfs as Tracers of Galactic Populations
• Simulation of Astronomical Images from Optical Survey Telescopes using a Comprehensive Photon Monte Carlo Approach
• The SDSS-2MASS-WISE Ten Dimensional Stellar Color Locus
• The meaning of WISE colours - I. The Galaxy and its satellites
• The Blanco Cosmology Survey: An Optically-Selected Galaxy Cluster Catalog and a Public Release of Optical Data Products
• Examining AGN UV/optical Variability Beyond the Simple Damped Random Walk
• A three dimensional extinction map of the Galactic Anticentre from multi-band photometry
• First-Year Spectroscopy for the SDSS-II Supernova Survey
• Stellar loci II. a model-free estimate of the binary fraction for field FGK stars
• Gaia Data Release 3: Cross-match of Gaia sources with variable objects from the literature
• Optical Properties of (162173) 1999 JU3: In Preparation for the JAXA Hayabusa 2 Sample Return Mission
• Supernova Progenitors, Their Variability, and the Type IIP Supernova ASASSN-16fq in M66
• Milky Way Tomography with the SkyMapper Southern Survey. II. Photometric Re-calibration of SMSS DR2
• The Photometric Metallicity and Carbon Distributions of the Milky Way's Halo and Solar Neighborhood from S-PLUS Observations of SDSS Stripe 82
• Data Release 2 of S-PLUS: accurate template-fitting based photometry covering $\sim$1000 square degrees in 12 optical filters
• J-PLUS: photometric calibration of large area multi-filter surveys with stellar and white dwarf loci
• Stellar color regression: a spectroscopy based method for color calibration to a few mmag accuracy and the recalibration of Stripe 82
• A Machine Learning Method to Infer Fundamental Stellar Parameters from Photometric Light Curves
• The star formation history of the Sculptor dwarf spheroidal galaxy
• STEP: The VST survey of the SMC and the Magellanic Bridge. I. Overview and first results
• The Saga of M81: Global View of a Massive Stellar Halo in Formation
• Discovery of a Candidate Binary Supermassive Black Hole in a Periodic Quasar from Circumbinary Accretion Variability
• CCD Parallaxes for 309 Late-type Dwarfs and Subdwarfs
• Finding Quasars behind the Galactic Plane. I. Candidate Selections with Transfer Learning
• Two More Candidate AM Canum Venaticorum (AM CVn) Binaries from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey
• The Time-Domain Spectroscopic Survey: Target Selection for Repeat Spectroscopy
• A forward modelling approach to AGN variability -- Method description and early applications
• Stellar loci I. Metallicity dependence and intrinsic widths
• Photometric Cross-Calibration of the SDSS Stripe 82 Standard Stars catalogue with Gaia EDR3, and Comparison with Pan-STARRS1, DES, CFIS and GALEX catalogues
• Stellar loci III: Photometric metallicities for half million FGK stars of Stripe 82
• Modeling Quasar UV/Optical Variability with the Corona-heated Accretion-disk Reprocessing (CHAR) Model
• 2006 SQ372: A Likely Long-Period Comet from the Inner Oort Cloud
• Validation and Improvement of the Pan-STARRS Photometric Calibration with the Stellar Color Regression Method
• Identification of RR Lyrae stars in multiband, sparsely-sampled data from the Dark Energy Survey using template fitting and Random Forest classification
• Persistent and occasional: searching for the variable population of the ZTF/4MOST sky using ZTF data release 11
• Evidence for a Young Stellar Population in Nearby Type 1 Active Galaxies
• Photometric recalibration of the SDSS Stripe 82 to a few milimagnitude precision with the stellar color regression method and Gaia EDR3
• Towards a Real-time Transient Classification Engine
• Ionization driven intrinsic absorption line variability of BAL quasars in the Stripe 82 region
• Mysterious, Variable, and Extremely Hot: White Dwarfs Showing Ultra-High Excitation Lines I. Photometric Variability
• Dust from Comet 209P/LINEAR during its 2014 Return: Parent Body of a New Meteor Shower, the May Camelopardalids
• A Catalog of Short Period Spectroscopic and Eclipsing Binaries Identified from the LAMOST & PTF Surveys
• Optical - Near Infrared Photometric Calibration of M-dwarf Metallicity and Its Application
• Ensemble power spectral density of SDSS quasars in UV/optical bands
• Monitoring Telluric Absorption with CAMAL
• The SOAR Gravitational Arc Survey - I: Survey overview and photometric catalogs
• A LOOK at Outbursts of Comet C/2014 UN${}_{271}$ (Bernardinelli-Bernstein) Near 20 au
• Monitoring the atmospheric throughput at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory with aTmCam
• The Massive Star Population in M101. III. Spectra and Photometry of the Luminous and Variable Stars
• Detecting the periodicity of highly irregularly sampled light-curves with Gaussian processes: the case of SDSSJ025214.67-002813.7
• Stellar loci IV. Red giant stars
• CosmoDM and its application to Pan-STARRS data
• Saying Hallo to M94's Stellar Halo: Investigating the Accretion History of the Largest Pseudobulge Host in the Local Universe
• SN 2018hna: Adding a Piece to the Puzzles of the Explosion of Blue Supergiants
• The ultraviolet luminosity function of star-forming galaxies between redshifts of 0.6 and 1.2
• Solving the puzzle of discrepant quasar variability on monthly time-scales implied by SDSS and CRTS data sets
• Variable stars in the bulge globular cluster NGC 6401
• Dark Energy Survey Identification of A Low-Mass Active Galactic Nucleus at Redshift 0.823 from Optical Variability
• A weak lensing analysis of the PLCK G100.2-30.4 cluster
• Photometric variability of candidate white dwarf binary systems from Palomar Transient Factory archival data
• The DECam Minute Cadence Survey I
• Identifying Candidate Optical Variables Using Gaia Data Release 2
• Observational nonstationarity of AGN variability: The only way to go is down!
• Examining AGN UV/Optical Variability Beyond the Simple Damped Random Walk. II. Insights from 22 Years Observations of SDSS, PS1 and ZTF
• A Catalog of LAMOST Variable Sources Based on Time-domain Photometry of ZTF
• Detecting long-period variability in SDSS Stripe 82 standards catalog
• AGNet: Weighing Black Holes with Deep Learning
• Reddening and the Shape of the Variable Component of the Continua of Active Galactic Nuclei From the Optical to the Far Ultraviolet. I
• Very Large Array imaging rules out precessing radio jets in three DES$-$SDSS-selected candidate periodic quasars
• Clash of Titans: The Impact of Cluster Mergers in the Galaxy Cluster Red Sequence
• A New Method For Robust High-Precision Time-Series Photometry From Well-Sampled Images: Application to Archival MMT/Megacam Observations of the Open Cluster M37
• Atmospheric effects in astroparticle physics experiments and the challenge of ever greater precision in measurements
• Processing GOTO data with the Rubin Observatory LSST Science Pipelines II: Forced Photometry and light curves
• Time Evolution of Mg II in SDSS J2320+0024: Implications for a Subparsec Binary Supermassive Black Hole System
• An Improved Photometric Calibration of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Imaging Data
• Forced Measurement of Astronomical Sources at Low Signal to Noise
• Optical Confirmation of X-ray selected Galaxy clusters from the Swift AGN and Cluster survey with MDM and Pan-STARRS Data (Paper III)
• Rapid characterization of exoplanet atmospheres with the Exoplanet Transmission Spectroscopy Imager (ETSI)
• PhotoD with LSST: Stellar Photometric Distances Out to the Edge of the Galaxy
• Photometric stellar parameters for asteroseismology and Galactic studies
• The Feasibility and Flexibility of Selecting Quasars by Variability Using Ensemble Machine Learning Algorithms
• A Template-Based Approach to the Photometric Classification of SN 1991bg-like Supernovae in the SDSS-II Supernova Survey
• Galaxy Optical Variability of Virgo Cluster: New Tracer for Environmental Influences on Galaxies
• Mid-infrared Variability-based AGN Selection using the Multi-epoch Photometric Data from WISE
• The ensemble broad-frequency power spectrum of Stripe-82 quasars from multiple surveys
• Exploring the Variable Sky with the Sloan Digital Sky Survey
• Low-Mass Stars in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey: Galactic Structure, Kinematics, and the Luminosity Function
• Identifications of RR Lyrae stars and Quasars from the simulated data of Mephisto-W Survey
• J-PLUS: Systematic impact of metallicity on photometric calibration with the stellar locus
• Optical Variability as a Probe of Hidden Nuclear Activity in Type 2 AGNs