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I’ll be at AstroFest hanging out, meeting students, and giving a talk on standard star calibrations. If you’re an an SAO alum, consider coming 🙂

Here’s the info on the talk I’ll be giving:

Standard Stars, Standard Colors, and the art of not being unique
Every set of optics has its own unique set of issues. Some are a little insensitive in the blue, some have something against red. Some filters let through a little more square of a band pass of light, and others let through more sloped a spectral energy distribution. These system to system irregularities mean that a particular star’s instrumental B-V on one scope is not the same as its instrumental B-V on a different telescope. Complicating this are atmospheric differences that cause different amounts of different wavelengths to be transmitted in different locations. For astronomical results between different scopes to be compared, astronomers must be able to transform instrumental magnitudes to a standard system. This is possible using all sky photometry on a photometric night.
In this session we will discuss how to obtain the observations necessary to transform observations to a standard system, as well as how to calculate the the needed transformation coefficients. The session will be divided into two parts, a lecture component and a practical session that will work through provided data.