The uBVI Photometric System. II. Standard Stars

Abstract

Paper I of this series described the design of a CCD-based photometric system that is optimized for ground-based measurements of the size of the Balmer discontinuity in stellar spectra. This "uBVI" system combines the Thuan-Gunn u filter with the standard Johnson-Kron-Cousins BVI filters, and it can be used to discover luminous yellow supergiants in extragalactic systems and post-asymptotic-giant-branch stars in globular clusters and galactic halos. In the present paper we use uBVI observations obtained on 54 nights with 0.9-m telescopes at Kitt Peak and Cerro Tololo to construct a catalog of standardized u magnitudes for standard stars taken from the 1992 catalog of Landolt. We describe the selection of our 14 Landolt fields, and give details of the photometric reductions, including red-leak and extinction corrections, transformation of all of the observations onto a common magnitude system, and establishment of the photometric zero point. We present a catalog of u magnitudes of 103 stars suitable for use as standards. We show that data obtained with other telescopes can be transformed to our standard system with better than 1% accuracy.