Towards the Flux Calibration of Small Telescope Spectra (Abstract)

Volume 48 number 2 (2020)

Wayne Green

Boulder Astronomy and Space Society, Boulder CO

Anthony Rodda

British Astronomical Society, London, United Kingdom

Clarke Yeager

Boulder Astronomy and Space Society, Boulder CO

Abstract

(Abstract only) We present a set of reference resources and machine-ready spectral data covering optical bands from UVA through 8000+ Angstroms, based on our literature/informatics search of bright spectro-photometric calibration sources suitable for small telescope investigations. These data are made available as “.dat” ASCII whitespace/column data with absolute units of ergs s–1 cm–2 Å. These catalogs have been translated and augmented for small telescope spectroscopy using additional data from SIMBAD, GAIA, and other references to produce a PostgreSQL database. We include a generic telluric line table and files suited to popular planning/operational planetarium programs. We discuss the salient aspects of each library reviewed. We include methodology to acquire spectral measurements of filters and lamp sources common with photometry and spectroscopy. These data and scripts are available through an MIT open source license via GitHUB/Docker and, to the extent possible, are platform agnostic.