Transforming observational data and theoretical isochrones into the ACS/WFC Vega-mag system

Abstract

We propose a zero-point photometric calibration of the data from the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) Wide Field Channel (WFC) on board the Hubble Space Telescope, based on a spectrum of Vega and the most up-to-date in-flight transmission curves of the camera. This calibration is accurate at the level of a few hundredths of a magnitude. The main purpose of this effort is to transform the entire set of evolutionary models into a simple observational photometric system for ACS/WFC data, and to make them available to the astronomical community. We provide the zero-points for the most used ACS/WFC bands, and give basic recipes for calibrating both the observed data and the models. We also present the colour-magnitude diagram from ACS data of five Galactic globular clusters, spanning the metallicity range -2.2 < -0.04, and we provide fiducial points representing their sequences from several magnitudes below the turn-off to the red giant branch tip. The observed sequences are compared with the models in the newly defined photometric system. © 2005 RAS.