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An Improved Photometric Calibration of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Imaging Data

Nikhil Padmanabhan^1,2,3, David J. Schlegel^1,4, Douglas P. Finkbeiner^4,5, J. C. Barentine^6,7, Michael R. Blanton⁸, Howard J. Brewington⁷, James E. Gunn⁴, Michael Harvanek⁷, David W. Hogg⁸, Željko Ivezić⁹, David Johnston^4,10, Stephen M. Kent¹¹, S. J. Kleinman^7,12, Gillian R. Knapp⁴, Jurek Krzesinski^7,13, Dan Long⁷, Eric H. Neilsen, Jr.^7,11, Atsuko Nitta^7,14, Craig Loomis^4,7, Robert H. Lupton⁴, Sam Roweis¹⁵, Stephanie A. Snedden⁷, Michael A. Strauss⁴, and Douglas L. Tucker¹¹

© 2008. The American Astronomical Society. All rights reserved. Printed in U.S.A.
The Astrophysical Journal, Volume 674, Number 2 Citation Nikhil Padmanabhan et al 2008 ApJ 674 1217 DOI 10.1086/524677

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Author affiliations

¹ Physics Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories, Berkeley, CA 94720-8160

² Joseph Henry Laboratories, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544

³ Hubble Fellow, Chamberlain Fellow

⁴ Department of Astrophysical Sciences, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544

⁵ Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Cambridge, MA 02138

⁶ Department of Astronomy, University of Texas, Austin, TX 78712-0259

⁷ Apache Point Observatory, Sunspot, NM 88349

⁸ Department of Physics, New York University, New York, NY 10003

⁹ Department of Astronomy, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195

¹⁰ Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA 91109

¹¹ Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, Batavia, IL 60510

¹² Subaru Telescope, Hilo, HI 96720

¹³ Mount Suhora Observatory, Cracow Pedagogical University, 30-084 Cracow, Poland

¹⁴ Gemini Observatory, Hilo, HI 96720

¹⁵ Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON M5S 3G4, Canada

Dates

Received 2007 March 20
Accepted 2007 October 8

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Abstract

We present an algorithm to photometrically calibrate wide-field optical imaging surveys, which simultaneously solves for the calibration parameters and relative stellar fluxes using overlapping observations. The algorithm decouples the problem of "relative" calibrations from that of "absolute" calibrations; the absolute calibration is reduced to determining a few numbers for the entire survey. We pay special attention to the spatial structure of the calibration errors, allowing one to isolate particular error modes in downstream analyses. Applying this to the SDSS imaging data, we achieve ~1% relative calibration errors across 8500 deg² in griz; the errors are ~2% for the u band. These errors are dominated by unmodeled atmospheric variations at Apache Point Observatory. These calibrations, dubbed "ubercalibration," are now public with SDSS Data Release 6 and will be a part of subsequent SDSS data releases.

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