Improvement of the Pan-STARRS Photometric Calibration with LAMOST and Gaia

TL;DR

This paper improves the photometric calibration of the Pan-STARRS survey by correcting spatial systematic errors using multiple methods, achieving high precision and providing tools for future high-accuracy astronomical measurements.

Contribution

The study introduces a new re-calibration approach for Pan-STARRS photometry using three methods, enhancing calibration accuracy and providing correction maps and tools.

Findings

Calibration precision of 5-7 mmag in most regions

Larger errors up to 0.04 mag in crowded Galactic plane

Methods agree within 1-2 mmag for all filters

Abstract

In this work, we perform the re-calibration of PS1 photometry by correcting for position-dependent systematic errors using the spectroscopy-based Stellar Color Regression method (SCR), the photometry-based SCR method (SCR$'$), and the Gaia XP synthetic photometry method (XPSP). We confirm the significant large-scale and small-scale spatial variation of 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 two-dimensional maps and a python package ({\url{https://doi.org/10.12149/101283}}) 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.