A catalogue of calibrator stars for long baseline stellar interferometry^*

LESIA, FRE2461, Observatoire de Paris, 5 place Jules Janssen, 92195 Meudon, France e-mail: Vincent.Foresto@obspm.fr; Gilles.Chagnon@obspm.fr; Guy.Perrin@obspm.fr

Corresponding author: P. Bordé, Pascal.Borde@obspm.fr

Received: 12 March 2002
Accepted: 27 June 2002

Abstract

Long baseline stellar interferometry shares with other techniques the need for calibrator stars in order to correct for instrumental and atmospheric effects. We present a catalogue of 374 stars carefully selected to be used for that purpose in the near infrared. Owing to several convergent criteria with the work of Cohen et al. ([CITE]), this catalogue is in essence a subset of their self-consistent all-sky network of spectro-photometric calibrator stars. For every star, we provide the angular limb-darkened diameter, uniform disc angular diameters in the J, H and K bands, the Johnson photometry and other useful parameters. Most stars are type III giants with spectral types K or M0, magnitudes –7 and –3. Their angular limb-darkened diameters range from 1 to 3 mas with a median uncertainty as low as 1.2%. The median distance from a given point on the sky to the closest reference is , whereas this distance never exceeds for any celestial location.