A catalog of bright calibrator stars for 200-m baseline near-infrared stellar interferometry
We present in this paper a catalog of reference stars suitable forcalibrating infrared interferometric observations. In the K band,visibilities can be calibrated with a precision of 1% on baselines up to200 meters for the whole sky, and up to 300 meters for some part of thesky. This work, extending to longer baselines a previous catalogcompiled by Bordé et al. (2002, A&A, 393, 183), isparticularl y well adapted to hectometric-class interferometers such asthe Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI, Glindemann et al. 2003,Proc. SPIE, 4838, 89) or the CHARA array (ten Brummelaar et al. 2003,Proc. SPIE, 4838, 69) when one is observing well-resolved, high-surfacebrightness objects (K 8). We use the absolute spectro-photometriccalibration method introduced by Cohen et al. (1999, AJ, 117, 1864) toderive the angular diameters of our new set of 948 G8-M0 calibratorstars extracted from the IRAS, 2MASS and MSX catalogs. Angular stellardiameters range from 0.6 mas to 1.8 mas (median is 1.1 mas) with amedian precision of 1.35%. For both the northern and southernhemispheres, the closest calibrator star is always less than 10°away.
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INHABITED SKY
