Calibration of the Surface Brightness Fluctution Method for use with the Hubble Space Telescope.

Details Calibration of the Surface Brightness Fluctution Method for use with the Hubble Space Telescope. Calibration of the Surface Brightness Fluctution Method for use with the Hubble Space Telescope.

Aug 1997

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=1997aj....114..626a&link_type=abstract

Astronomical Journal v.114, p. 626-634 (1997)

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astronomy

51

Telescopes, Techniques: Photometric

Scientific paper

This paper presents the calibration of the surface brightness fluctuation (SBF) technique for use with the Wide Field and Planetary Camera-2 (WFPC-2) on the Hubble Space Telescope (HST). The calibration has a color term and zeropoint significantly different from the Kron-Cousins I-band SBF technique developed for ground-based observations. It is a required first step for using SBF at the larger distances now made possible with HST. WFPC-2 observations of 16 nearby galaxies through the F555W and F814W filters were tied to the V and I photometry of the ground-based SBF Survey (Tonry et al. 1997 [apj, 475, 399]). The calibration of the photometry agrees with that of Holtzman et al. (1995, pasp, 107, 1065) to within a few percent. We used a composite WFPC-2 point spread function (PSF) to measure mbar, and we found that SBF measurements are relatively insensitive to small variations in the PSF. The identification of globular clusters and dust is much easier with HST's high spatial resolution. We computed Mf8bar for the sample from the measured f8bar and the ground-based SBF Survey distance modulus. The best fitting calibration has Mf8bar = (-1.73 +/- 0.07) + (6.5 +/- 0.7) [viz - 1.15]. This color dependence is significantly steeper than the one for I_KC used on the ground. The total rms about this fit is 0.16 mag, reflecting not only the error in WFPC-2 measurements presented here but also the errors in the ground-based distance moduli. After accounting for additional sources of error of ~ 0.05-0.10 mag, the HST observations and ground-based observations are seen to contribute roughly equally to the residual error. We measured f8bar for NGC 3379 from the ground to check this calibration. The distance obtained using the F814W filter and the HST calibration agreed well with that obtained in the SBF Survey. For NGC 3379 we also compared the difference in fluctuation magnitudes Delta mbar between the I_KC and I_F814W filters to theoretical predictions for a typical old, metal rich population of a giant elliptical galaxy and found excellent agreement.

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