Optical and UV Spectrophotometric Standard Stars

Welcome to a tool for finding suitable optical and ultra-violet spectrophotometric standard stars on the sky most appropriate to reduction of astronomical spectroscopic observations.

This resource consists of a set of WWW pages each devoted to a single spectrophotometric standard star and containing positional information, magnitude, a finding chart and plots of the magnitude and flux against wavelength, as shown on an (example page). The Right Ascension and Declination are in the HST Guide Star Catalogue coordinates (equinox 2000).
The finding charts have the conventional orientation, north at the top and east to the left and the image dimensions are indicated. If not arrowed, the standard star is the one in the centre of the field.

Access to the standards is either through:
an RA ordered list;
an RA-Dec sky map with star positions to enable the closest standard star to your observed source to be quickly identified.

The data for the standard stars come from five sources:

The data from which the plots were produced are available here or from the standard star pages.

Some of the finding charts were produced from the Digitized Sky Survey produced by STScI and based on plate material from the UK Schmidt Telescope and the Oschin Schmidt Telescope.

Suggestions for further standard stars to include are welcome.