Photometric Calibration of the First 1.5 Years of the Pan-STARRS1 Survey

Abstract

We present a precise photometric calibration of the first 1.5 years of science imaging from the Pan-STARRS1 survey (PS1), an ongoing optical survey of the entire sky north of declination –30° in five bands. Building on the techniques employed by Padmanabhan et al. in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), we use repeat PS1 observations of stars to perform the relative calibration of PS1 in each of its five bands, simultaneously solving for the system throughput, the atmospheric transparency, and the large-scale detector flat field. Both internal consistency tests and comparison against the SDSS indicate that we achieve relative precision of <10 mmag in g, r, and i P1, and ~10 mmag in z and y P1. The spatial structure of the differences with the SDSS indicates that errors in both the PS1 and SDSS photometric calibration contribute similarly to the differences. The analysis suggests that both the PS1 system and the Haleakala site will enable <1% photometry over much of the sky.