J-PLUS: Photometric Re-calibration with the Stellar Color Regression Method and an Improved Gaia XP Synthetic Photometry Method

TL;DR

This paper improves the photometric calibration of the J-PLUS survey by employing stellar color regression and an enhanced Gaia XP synthetic photometry method, achieving higher precision and identifying systematic errors in previous data.

Contribution

It introduces a combined calibration approach using SCR and improved Gaia XP spectra, significantly reducing systematic errors and enhancing zero-point accuracy for J-PLUS DR3 photometry.

Findings

Achieved 1-5 mmag agreement between SCR and XPSP methods.

Improved zero-point precision by two-fold.

Calibrated 91% of tiles within LAMOST footprint.

Abstract

We employ the corrected Gaia Early Data Release 3 (EDR3) photometric data and spectroscopic data from the Large Sky Area Multi-Object Fiber Spectroscopic Telescope (LAMOST) DR7 to assemble a sample of approximately 0.25 million FGK dwarf photometric standard stars for the 12 J-PLUS filters using the Stellar Color Regression (SCR) method. We then independently validated the J-PLUS DR3 photometry, and uncovered significant systematic errors: up to 15 mmag in the results of Stellar Locus (SL) method, and up to 10 mmag mainly caused by magnitude-, color-, and extinction-dependent errors of the Gaia XP spectra with the Gaia BP/RP (XP) Synthetic Photometry (XPSP) method. We have also further developed the XPSP method using the corrected Gaia XP spectra by Huang et al. (2023) and applied it to the J-PLUS DR3 photometry. This resulted in an agreement of 1-5 mmag with the SCR method, and a two-fold improvement in the J-PLUS zero-point precision. Finally, the zero-point calibration for around 91% of the tiles within the LAMOST observation footprint is determined through the SCR method, with the remaining approximately 9% of tiles outside this footprint relying on the improved XPSP method. The re-calibrated J-PLUS DR3 photometric data establishes a solid data foundation for conducting research that depends on high-precision photometric calibration.