The Secondary Standards programme for OmegaCAM at the VST

Abstract

The OmegaCAM wide-field imager will start operations at the ESO VLT Survey Telescope at Paranal, Chile, in 2007. The photometric calibration of OmegaCAM data depends on standard star measurements that cover the complete 1 square degree FoV of OmegeaCAM. A catalog fullfilling this requirement for eight Landolt equatorial fields, denoted the OmegaCAM Secondary Standards Catalog, will be constructed from OmegaCAM observations during the first year of operations. Here we present the 'Preliminary Catalog' which will be used to bootstrap the construction of the OmegaCAM Secondary Standards Catalog. Thus the Preliminary Catalog will be used to assess the performance of OmegaCAM+VST early-on. The catalog is based on WFC data from the INT at La Palma.

To appear in ASP conference proceedings for The Future of Photometric, Spectrophotometric, and polarimetric standardization, held in Blankenberge Belgium, may 8-11 2006. Figures available separately from manuscript and with degraded resolution. See http://www.astro-wise.org/Public/blankenberge_verdoes.ps.gz for manuscript with figures included in full resolution