Building the 'JMMC Stellar Diameters Catalog' using SearchCal

TL;DR

This paper presents the creation of a comprehensive static catalog of stellar diameters derived from SearchCal, enhancing calibration capabilities for astronomical observations with a new Virtual Observatory service.

Contribution

It introduces a large static catalog of stellar diameters from SearchCal results and a new VO service for reporting and querying bad calibrators.

Findings

Catalog contains over 38,000 entries with HIPPARCOS parallaxes.

The static catalog complements the dynamic SearchCal querying system.

A new VO service allows astronomers to flag and access bad calibrators.

Abstract

The JMMC Calibrator Workgroup has long developed methods to ascertain the angular diameter of stars, and provides this expertise in the SearchCal software. SearchCal dynamically finds calibrators near science objects by querying CDS hosted catalogs according to observational parameters. Initially limited to bright objects (K magnitude </- 5.5), it has been upgraded with a new method providing calibrators without any magnitude limit but those of queried catalogs. We introduce here a new static catalog of stellar diameters, containing more than 38000 entries, obtained from SearchCal results aggregation on the whole celestial sphere, complete for all stars with HIPPARCOS parallaxes. We detail the methods and tools used to produce and study this catalog, and compare the static catalog approach with the dynamical querying provided by SearchCal engine. We also introduce a new Virtual Observatory service, enabling the reporting of, and querying about, stars flagged as "bad calibrators" by astronomers, adding this ever-growing database to our SearchCal service.