Photometric catalogue for space and ground night-time remote-sensing calibration: RGB synthetic photometry from Gaia DR3 spectrophotometry

This article belongs to the Special Issue Light Pollution Monitoring Using Remote Sensing Data II.Recent works have made strong efforts to produce standardised photometry in RGB bands. For this purpose, we carefully defined the transmissivity curves of RGB bands and defined a set of standard sources using the photometric information present in Gaia EDR3. This work aims not only to significantly increase the number and accuracy of RGB standards but also to provide, for the first time, reliable uncertainty estimates using the BP and RP spectrophotometry published in Gaia DR3 instead of their integrated photometry to predict RGB photometry. Furthermore, this method allows including calibrated sources regardless of how they are affected by extinction, which was a major shortcoming of previous work. The RGB photometry is synthesised from the Gaia BP and RP low-resolution spectra by directly using their set of coefficients multiplied with some basis functions provided in the Gaia catalogue for all sources published in Gaia DR3. The output synthetic magnitudes are compared with the previous catalogue of RGB standards available.This work was (partially) funded by the Spanish MICIN/AEI/10.13039/ 501100011033 and by “ERDF A way of making Europe” by the European Union through grants RTI2018-095076-B-C21 and PID2021-122842OB-C21 and the Institute of Cosmos Sciences University of Barcelona (ICCUB, Unidad de Excelencia ‘María de Maeztu’) through grant CEX2019-000918-M. Funding for the DPAC has been provided by national institutions—in particular, the institutions participating in the Gaia Multilateral Agreement. This project received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 847635 (UNA4CAREER). RALAN map project.Peer reviewe