Digitized Data of China Astronomical Plates: Photometric Catalogs of Single-exposure Plates and Variable Candidates
Publish Time:2025-07-08 
The Chinese Plate-Digitizing Project has digitized a total number of about 30,000  astronomical plates from 11 telescopes of five observatories (SHAO, NAOC, PMO, YNAO, and QDO) in China, spanning nearly 100 years of observations.  
In this work, we present a photometric calibration method to calibrate about 15,000 single-exposure plates to the JKC photometric system. Using standard stars constructed from the BEST database（https://nadc.china-vo.org/data/best/）, we have identified and corrected various systematic effects (including the magnitude term, color term, and flat-field term) to a high precision. The final photometric precision is typically 0.15, 0.23, 0.17, 0.11, 0.19 mag for plates collected in SHAO, NAOC, PMO, YNAO, and QDO, respectively, with best cases reaching 0.07, 0.08, 0.06, 0.05, and 0.11 mag, respectively. Candidates of variable sources are also identified. 
The naming format for the photometric catalogs (under the "table" directory) are: “plate name - calibration band.fits”. The variable source candidates (under the “vars” directory) naming format to Gaia DR3's “sourceID.fits”.
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Data Download
♦Introduction♦
Keywords
Stellar photometry , Astronomy data analysis , Calibration , Variable stars
Data Volume
66.13 GB 2824490 files
Sharing Method
online
Sharing Scope
Public
DOI
CSTR
VO Identifier
ivo://China-VO/data/legacyplate-photometric/
♦Contact Author♦
Author
Haibo Yuan
Email
yuanhb(at)bnu.edu.cn
♦Contact Publisher ♦
Email
support(at)china-vo.org
Phone
+86-10-64807973
Institution
National Astronomical Data Center
♦Tags♦
waveband
Optical
telescope or project
Astronomical plate library
subject
Star and Interstellar Matter
data type
Catalog Data
production age
1980-
content level
Research
Amateur