Calibration and Instrument Stability Group: CALISTA

ESO astronomers dedicate large amount of time to better characterize the VLT site and instruments. This page collects results relevant to various instruments on Paranal. It also serves as a general access to relevant calibration data. It is far from being exhaustive: please contact the Calibration And Instrument Stability Group to suggest additional relevant results or links.

2007 ESO Instrument Calibration workshop

  • The 2007 ESO Instrument Calibration Workshop was the opportunity to present various results or projects related to the calibration of ESO instruments and other. Users registered to SpringerLink can have access to the Proceedings, otherwise available in the ESO Astrophysics Symposia series.

    • Sky characteristics

  • The Brightness of the Night Sky The night sky brightness, together with number of clear nights, seeing, transparency, photometric stability and humidity, are some of the most important parameters that qualify a site for front-line ground--based astronomy...
  • Astroclimatology Forecasts of Observing Conditions on ESO Sites. Access to the ESO Ambient Condition Database Server. General information and long term statistics. Related publications. Single star Cn2 Profiler, including Measurements
  • Flux calibrated IR night sky spectrum (J, H, K bands) based on SINFONI data. The page also contains a link to the night sky atlas at the resolution of ISAAC. In the future, it will also contain a sky atlas obtained at the resolution of CRIRES.
  • Water vapor measurements at Paranal. Currently based on VISIR and CRIRES measurements.

    • Photometric standard stars

    Optical: FORS1 standard star fields
    FORS2 standard star fields
    Near-IR: ISAAC Photometric Standards
    NACO Photometric Standards
    Faint UKIRT standard selected for HAWK-I
    2-MASS point source catalog through Vizier
    Mid-IR: VISIR standard star catalogs

    Telluric and Spectrophotometric standard stars

    Optical: UVES Spectrophotometric standard stars
    Near-IR: ISAAC page on calibration in the IR, list of telluric standards
    ISAAC: Library of Stellar Spectra for spectrophotometric calibration
    Hipparcos Telluric standard finder
    Spectro-photometric standard stars. Models for these stars in the range 950 to 5466 nm
    Mid-IR: VISIR standard star catalogues

    Radial-Velocity standards

    Optical: Catalog (ASCII). See also the Geneva Radial-Velocity Standard Stars web page.

    Polarimetry

    Standard stars

    Optical: Standard Stars for Linear Polarization Observed with FORS1
    Near-IR: Polarimetric Standard Stars from ISAAC

    Polarization studies

  • Polarimetric standardization
  • A study of the UVES instrumental polarisation (PDF file). "...measurements show no evidence for the presence of a UVES instrumental polarisation."

    • Astrometry

    Optical: UCAC2 catalog query through Vizier
    UCAC2 catalog, bright star supplements, query through Vizier

    VLTI calibrators

    VLTI Calibrator Selector

    Relevant conference proceedings

    2007

  • The Future of Photometric, Spectrophotometric and Polarimetric Standardization
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