A catalogue of calibrator stars for long baseline stellar interferometry

Long baseline stellar interferometry shares with other techniques the need for calibrator stars in order to correct for instrumental and atmospheric effects. We present a catalogue of 374 stars carefully selected to be used for that purpose in the near infrared. Owing to several convergent criteria with the work of Cohen et al. (\cite{cohen99}), this catalogue is in essence a subset of their self-consistent all-sky network of spectro-photometric calibrator stars. For every star, we provide the angular limb-darkened diameter, uniform disc angular diameters in the J, H and K bands, the Johnson photometry and other useful parameters. Most stars are type III giants with spectral types K or M0, magnitudes V=3-7 and K=0-3. Their angular limb-darkened diameters range from 1 to 3 mas with a median uncertainty as low as 1.2%. The median distance from a given point on the sky to the closest reference is 5.2degr , whereas this distance never exceeds 16.4degr for any celestial location. The catalogue is only available in electronic form at the CDS via anonymous ftp to cdsarc.u-strasbg.fr (130.79.128.5) or via http://cdsweb.u-strasbg.fr/cgi-bin/qcat?J/A+A/393/183