APASS Landolt-Sloan BVgri photometry of RAVE stars. I. Data, effective temperatures, and reddenings

Abstract

© 2014. The American Astronomical Society. All rights reserved. We provide AAVSO Photometric All-Sky Survey (APASS) photometry in the Landolt BV and Sloan g′r′i′ bands for all 425,743 stars included in the fourth RAVE Data Release. The internal accuracy of the APASS photometry of RAVE stars, expressed as the error of the mean of data obtained and separately calibrated over a median of four distinct observing epochs and distributed between 2009 and 2013, is 0.013, 0.012, 0.012, 0.014, and 0.021 mag for the B, V, g′, r′, and i′ bands, respectively. The equally high external accuracy of APASS photometry has been verified on secondary Landolt and Sloan photometric standard stars not involved in the APASS calibration process and on a large body of literature data on field and cluster stars, confirming the absence of offsets and trends. Compared with the Carlsberg Meridian Catalog (CMC-15), APASS astrometry of RAVE stars is accurate to a median value of 0.098 arcsec. Brightness distribution functions for the RAVE stars have been derived in all bands. APASS photometry of RAVE stars, augmented by 2MASS JHK infrared data, has been χ2 fitted to a densely populated synthetic photometric library designed to widely explore temperature, surface gravity, metallicity, and reddening. Resulting Teff and EB-V, computed over a range of options, are provided and discussed, and will be kept updated in response to future APASS and RAVE data releases. In the process, we find that the reddening caused by a homogeneous slab of dust, extending for 140 pc on either side of the Galactic plane and responsible for EB-V poles = 0.036 ± 0.002 at the Galactic poles, is a suitable approximation of the actual reddening encountered at Galactic latitudes |b| ≥ 25°.