The Stony Brook/SMARTS Spectral Standards Library

As a part of the SMARTS spectroscopic observing program, I have been amassing a series of observations of mostly-southern spectroscopic standard stars. These are all bright stars, and are usually observed in twilight, as fillers at the beginnings and ends of the night, or through clouds when the primary observing program would be seriously compromised.

The following tables list all the standards we have observed to date. It will be updated as appropriate.

Standards and their spectral types have been gleaned from a number of sources.

For each grating setup, we provide a gif image and the fits file containing the reduced data. The data have been reduced by our IDL pipeline.

Details about the format of the fits file are provided here. The plots are of the first vector in the file, the boxcar extracted, flux-corrected spectrum. Note that the fluxes are not absolute, since this is A.) slit spectroscopy, and B.) many of the spectra were obtained under less-than-ideal conditions. The purpose of the calibration is to remove the instrumental response and approximate the true continuum shape. However, there may be low frequency features in the continuum, and the continuum shapes near the ends of the spectral range can be untrustworthy. These artifacts result from the polynomial fitting of the photometric standard star data.

All the fits files are available in this gzipped tar file. Individual files are named using the designation in the first column of the table. The file size is currently 16.4 MB.

Notes about the spectral types are taken from Eric Mamajek's compendium.

Spectral
Type HD Number
Other name Grating 13
3150-9350
R^-1=17.2A Grating 26
3530-5300
R^-1=4.3A Grating 32Ib
3800-7250
R^-1=8.6A Grating 35
5900-7700
R^-1=4.3A Grating 47/I
5650-6970
R^-1=3.1A Grating 47/II
3880-4550
R^-1=1.6A Grating 47/IIb
4060-4700
R^-1=1.6A Grating 58/I
6000-9000
R^-1=6.5A Notes