Photometric Calibration of NGS/POSS and ESO/SRC Plates Using the NOAO PDS Measuring Engine. I. Stellar Photometry

The PDS/Monet measuring engine at NOAO was used to obtain photometry of nearly 10,000 stars in the NGS/POSS and 2,000 stars on the ESO/SRC Survey glass plates. These measurements have been used to show that global transformation functions exist that allow calibration of stellar photometry from any blue or red plate to equivalent Johnsen B and Cousins R photoelectric magnitudes. We have characterized the four transformation functions appropriate for the POSS O and E and ESO/SRC J and R plates, and found that within the measurement uncertainties they vary from plate-to-plate only by photometric zero-point offsets. A method is described to correct for the zero-point shifts and to obtain calibrated B and R photometry of stellar sources to an average accuracy of 0.3-0.4 magnitudes within the range 8 Abt, WHAT FRACTION OF REFERENCES ARE INCORRECT? From a systematic study of 1009 references in the Astrophysical Journal it was found that 12.2% had errors. Only 0.4% of the referenced papers could not be found at all; another 3.0% were found by searching in volume, annual, and five-year indexes and the remaining correctly- and incorrectly-referenced papers were found right away. Another 8.3% of the references have errors in the first authors' names or in the journal names, and volume and page numbers such that they could be misplaced in the Science Citation Index (SCI). However, the compilers of SCI match all citations against a computerized file of the source papers and correct some of the citations, so that only 3.6% of the citations are missing or displaced in SCI. (SECTION: Instrumentation and Data Analysis)