Improvement of Pan-STARRS Photometric Calibration with LAMOST and Gaia

Abstract

In this work, we perform the recalibration of Pan-STARRS1 (PS1) photometry by correcting for position-dependent systematic errors using the spectroscopy-based stellar color regression (SCR) method, the photometry-based SCR method, and the Gaia BP/RP synthetic photometry method. We confirm the significant large-scale and small-scale spatial variation of the magnitude offsets for all the grizy filters. We show that the PS1 photometric calibration precisions in the grizy filters are around 5–7 mmag when averaged over 14′ regions. We note a much larger calibration error up to 0.04 mag in the Galactic plane, which is probably caused by the systematic errors of the PS1 magnitudes in crowded fields. The results of the three methods are consistent with each other within 1–2 mmag or better for all the filters. We provide 2D maps and a Python package to correct for position-dependent magnitude offsets of PS1, which can be used for high-precision investigations and as a reference to calibrate other surveys.

Keywords

• Stellar photometry
• Astronomy data analysis
• Calibration