Calibration of the MACHO photometry database

The MACHO Project is a microlensing survey that monitors the brightnesses of -60 million stars in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), Small Magellanic Cloud, and Galactic bulge. The database presently contains more photometric measurements than previously recorded in the history of astronomy. We describe the calibration of the MACHO two-color photometry and transformation to the standard Kron-Cousins V and R system. This allows for proper comparison with all other observations on the Kron-Cousins standard system. The highest precision calibrations are for -9 million stars in the LMC bar. For these stars, independent photometric measurements in field-overlap regions indicate standard deviations {sigma}{sub V} = {sigma}{sub R} = 0.020 mag. Calibrated MACHO photometry data are compared with published photometric sequences and with new Hubble Space Telescope observations. We additionally describe the first application of these calibrated data: the construction of the �efficiency� color-magnitude diagram which will be used to calculate our experimental sensitivity for detecting microlensing in the LMC