Observer's Tools and Generic Standard Stars

Also check the Observing Tools and Services page in Science Users Information.

Positions, Airmass, Almanach...

• Sky Calendar Tool: Sun rise, Sun set, twilights, Moon rise and set for one full month
• Object Seasonal Observability: visibility of an object over a long period
• Digital Sky Survey:
  • DSS-1 and -2, Full interface at Garching Headquarters
  • 2MASS all-Sky Infrared Survey
• Airmass, Extinction coefficients, Parallactic angle...:
  • Airmasses Calculator: This tool provides hourly airmasses based on site, date, and object coordinates information. It provides tabular output.
  • Plots: Draws the airmass curves for a list of objects, for a given night
  • Extinction coefficients for La Silla (old danish 1.54m page)
• Paralactic Angle Calculator, originally designed for 1.5Dk+DFOSC, but useful for any observations

Units Converters and Ephemeris

• Magnitude/Jansky Convertor (from ST-ECF NICMOS), and the Ultimate Magnitude/Flux/Magnitude convertor, from STSci
• JD converter: Converts civil date to julian date and reverse
• Horizons Ephemeris calculator from JPL. The code to use for La Silla is 809.

Fluxes, Magnitudes, Exposure Times, Filters

• Exposure Time Calculators
• The ESO Filter Catalogue

Standard Stars

This is definitely not a complete list. Some of the instruments have specific lists of standards.

• Optical:
  • Landolt's Standard Fields, with finding charts scanned
  • Photometric Calibration OBs for EMMI, SuSI and EFOSC2 (gZipped PostScript, 2Mb)
  • UV and Vis Spectrophotometric standards
  • Spectrophotometric Calibration OBs for EMMI (gZipped PostScript,
• Infrared
• Photometric Standard Stars: NICMOS and ARNICA
• Spectrophotometric Standards
  • List
  • Maps
  1.6Mb)
• Telluric star search tool