Brorfelde Schmidt CCD Catalog (BSCC)

The Brorfelde Schmidt CCD Catalog (BSCC) contains about 13.7 million stars, north of +49 deg Declination with precise positions and V, R photometry. The catalog has been constructed from the reductions of 18,667 CCD frames observed with the Brorfelde Schmidt Telescope between 2000 and 2007. The Tycho-2 catalog was used for astrometric and photometric reference stars. Errors of individual positions are about 20 to 200 mas for stars in the R = 10 to 18 mag range. External comparisons with 2MASS and SDSS reveal possible small systematic errors in the BSCC of up to about 30 mas. The catalog is supplemented with J, H, and K_s magnitudes from the 2MASS catalog. The catalog data file (about 550 MB ASCII, compressed) will be made available at the Strasbourg Data Center (CDS).Comment: 16 pages, 22 figures, 2 tables, accepted by A

The second US Naval Observatory CCD Astrograph Catalog (UCAC2)

The second USNO CCD Astrograph Catalog, UCAC2 was released in July 2003. Positions and proper motions for 48,330,571 sources (mostly stars) are available on 3 CDs, supplemented with 2MASS photometry for 99.5% of the sources. The catalog covers the sky area from -90 to +40 degrees declination, going up to +52 in some areas; this completely supersedes the UCAC1 released in 2001. Current epoch positions are obtained from observations with the USNO 8-inch Twin Astrograph equipped with a 4k CCD camera. The precision of the positions are 15 to 70 mas, depending on magnitude, with estimated systematic errors of 10 mas or below. Proper motions are derived by utilizing over 140 ground-and space-based catalogs, including Hipparcos/Tycho, the AC2000.2, as well as yet unpublished re-measures of the AGK2 plates and scans from the NPM and SPM plates. Proper motion errors are about 1 to 3 mas/yr for stars to 12th magnitude, and about 4 to 7 mas/yr for fainter stars to 16th magnitude. The observational data, astrometric reductions, results, and important information for the users of this catalog are presented.Comment: accepted by AJ, AAS LaTeX, 14 figures, 10 table

The StarScan plate measuring machine: overview and calibrations

The StarScan machine at the U.S. Naval Observatory (USNO) completed measuring photographic astrograph plates to allow determination of proper motions for the USNO CCD Astrograph Catalog (UCAC) program. All applicable 1940 AGK2 plates, about 2200 Hamburg Zone Astrograph plates, 900 Black Birch (USNO Twin Astrograph) plates, and 300 Lick Astrograph plates have been measured. StarScan comprises of a CCD camera, telecentric lens, air-bearing granite table, stepper motor screws, and Heidenhain scales to operate in a step-stare mode. The repeatability of StarScan measures is about 0.2 micrometer. The CCD mapping as well as the global table coordinate system has been calibrated using a special dot calibration plate and the overall accuracy of StarScan x,y data is derived to be 0.5 micrometer. Application to real photographic plate data shows that position information of at least 0.65 micrometer accuracy can be extracted from course grain 103a-type emulsion astrometric plates. Transformations between "direct" and "reverse" measures of fine grain emulsion plate measures are obtained on the 0.3 micrometer level per well exposed stellar image and coordinate, which is at the limit of the StarScan machine.Comment: 24 pages, 8 figures, accepted for PAS

The KELT-South Telescope

The Kilodegree Extremely Little Telescope (KELT) project is a survey for new transiting planets around bright stars. KELT-South is a small-aperture, wide-field automated telescope located at Sutherland, South Africa. The telescope surveys a set of 26 degree by 26 degree fields around the southern sky, and targets stars in the range of 8 < V < 10 mag, searching for transits by Hot Jupiters. This paper describes the KELT-South system hardware and software and discusses the quality of the observations. We show that KELT-South is able to achieve the necessary photometric precision to detect transits of Hot Jupiters around solar-type main-sequence stars.Comment: 26 pages, 13 figure

All-Sky spectrally matched UBVRI-ZY and u'g'r'i'z' magnitudes for stars in the Tycho2 catalog

We present fitted UBVRI-ZY and u'g'r'i'z' magnitudes, spectral types and distances for 2.4M stars, derived from synthetic photometry of a library spectrum that best matches the Tycho2 BtVt, NOMAD Rn and 2MASS JHK_{2/S} catalog magnitudes. We present similarly synthesized multi-filter magnitudes, types and distances for 4.8M stars with 2MASS and SDSS photometry to g<16 within the Sloan survey region, for Landolt and Sloan primary standards, and for Sloan Northern (PT) and Southern secondary standards. The synthetic magnitude zeropoints for BtVt, UBVRI, ZvYv, JHK_{2/S}, JHK_{MKO}, Stromgren uvby, Sloan u'g'r'i'z' and ugriz are calibrated on 20 calspec spectrophotometric standards. The UBVRI and ugriz zeropoints have dispersions of 1--3%, for standards covering a range of color from -0.3 < V-I < 4.6; those for other filters are in the range 2--5%. The spectrally matched fits to Tycho2 stars provide estimated 1-sigma errors per star of ~0.2, 0.15, 0.12, 0.10 and 0.08 mags respectively in either UBVRI or u'g'r'i'z'; those for at least 70% of the SDSS survey region to g<16 have estimated 1-sigma errors per star of ~0.2, 0.06, 0.04, 0.04, 0.05 in u'g'r'i'z' or UBVRI. The density of Tycho2 stars, averaging about 60 stars per square degree, provides sufficient stars to enable automatic flux calibrations for most digital images with fields of view of 0.5 degree or more. Using several such standards per field, automatic flux calibration can be achieved to a few percent in any filter, at any airmass, in most workable observing conditions, to facilitate inter-comparison of data from different sites, telescopes and instruments.Comment: 36 pages, 30 figures, 3 printed tables, several electronic tables, accepted PASP Dec 201

Semiparametric sieve-type generalized least squares inference

This article considers the problem of statistical inference in linear regression models with dependent errors. A sieve-type generalized least squares (GLS) procedure is proposed based on an autoregressive approximation to the generating mechanism of the errors. The asymptotic properties of the sieve-type GLS estimator are established under general conditions, including mixingale-type conditions as well as conditions which allow for long-range dependence in the stochastic regressors and/or the errors. A Monte Carlo study examines the finite-sample properties of the method for testing regression hypotheses