Relative and absolute calibration for multi-band data collected with the 2.2 m ESO/MPI and 1.54 m Danish telescopes

Abstract

We present the strategies adopted in the relative and absolute calibration of two different data sets: U,B,V,I-band images collected with the Wide Field Imager (WFI) mosaic camera mounted on the 2.2 m ESO/MPI Telescope and u,v,b,y calastrom images collected with the 1.54 m Danish Telescope (ESO, La Silla). In the case of the WFI camera we adopted two methods for the calibration, one for images collected before 2002, with the ESO filters U/38ESO841 and B/99ESO842, and a different one for data secured after 2002, with the filters U/50ESO877 and B/123 ESO878. The positional and color effects turned out to be stronger for images collected with the old filters. The eight WFI chips of these images were corrected one by one, while in the case of images secured with the new filters, we corrected the entire mosaic in a single step. In the case of the Danish data set, we compared point-spread function (PSF) and aperture photometry for each frame, finding a trend in both the X and Y directions of the chip. The corrections resulted in a set of first and second order polynomials to be applied to the instrumental magnitudes of each individual frame as a function of the star position. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.