The ever-expanding depth and quality of photometric and spectroscopic observations of stellar populations increase the need for theoretical models in regions of age-composition parameter space that are largely unexplored at present. Stellar evolution models that employ the most advanced physics and cover a wide range of compositions are needed to extract the most information from current observations of both resolved and unresolved stellar populations. The Dartmouth Stellar Evolution Database is a collection of stellar evolution tracks and isochrones that spans a range of [Fe/H] from -2.5 to +0.5, [alpha/Fe] from -0.2 to +0.8 (for [Fe/H] <=0) or +0.2 (for [Fe/H] >0), and initial He mass fractions from Y=0.245 to 0.40. Stellar evolution tracks were computed for masses between 0.1 and 4 Msun, allowing isochrones to be generated for ages as young as 250 Myr. For the range in masses where the core He flash occurs, separate He-burning tracks were computed starting from the zero age horizontal branch. The tracks and isochrones have been transformed to the observational plane in a variety of photometric systems including standard UBV(RI)c, Stromgren uvby, SDSS ugriz, 2MASS JHKs, and HST ACS-WFC and WFPC2. The Dartmouth Stellar Evolution Database is accessible through a website at http://stellar.dartmouth.edu/~models/ where all tracks, isochrones, and additional files can be downloaded.Comment: 37 pages, 11 figures, accepted by ApJ

We describe here the most ambitious survey currently planned in the optical, the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST). The LSST design is driven by four main science themes: probing dark energy and dark matter, taking an inventory of the solar system, exploring the transient optical sky, and mapping the Milky Way. LSST will be a large, wide-field ground-based system designed to obtain repeated images covering the sky visible from Cerro Pachón in northern Chile. The telescope will have an 8.4 m (6.5 m effective) primary mirror, a 9.6 deg 2 field of view, a 3.2-gigapixel camera, and six filters (ugrizy) covering the wavelength range 320-1050 nm. The project is in the construction phase and will begin regular survey operations by 2022. About 90% of the observing time will be devoted to a deep-wide-fast survey mode that will uniformly observe a 18,000 deg 2 region about 800 times (summed over all six bands) during the anticipated 10 yr of operations and will yield a co-added map to r∼27.5. These data will result in databases including about 32 trillion observations of 20 billion galaxies and a similar number of stars, and they will serve the majority of the primary science programs. The remaining 10% of the observing time will be allocated to special projects such as Very Deep and Very Fast time domain surveys, whose details are currently under discussion. We illustrate how the LSST science drivers led to these choices of system parameters, and we describe the expected data products and their characteristics.

The ACS Survey of Galactic Globular Clusters, an HST Treasury Project, will deliver high quality, homogeneous photometry of 65 globular clusters. This paper introduces a new collection of stellar evolution tracks and isochrones suitable for analyzing the ACS Survey data. Stellar evolution models were computed at [Fe/H]= -2.5, -2.0, -1.5, -1.0, -0.5, and 0; [α/Fe]= -0.2, 0, 0.2, 0.4, 0.6, and 0.8; and three initial He abundances for masses from 0.1 to 1.8 M ⊙ and ages from 2 to 15 Gyr. Each isochrone spans a wide range in luminosity from M V ∼14 -2up to the tip of the red giant branch. These are complemented by a set of Heburning tracks that extend from the zero age horizontal branch to the onset of thermal pulsations on the asymptotic giant branch. In addition, a set of computer programs are provided that make it possible to interpolate the isochrones in [Fe/H], generate luminosity functions from the isochrones, and create synthetic horizontal branch models. The tracks and isochrones have been converted to the observational plane with two different color-T eff transformations, one synthetic and one semi-empirical, in ground-based B, V, and I, and F606W and F814W for both ACS-WFC and WFPC2 systems. All models and programs presented in this paper are available from http://stellar.dartmouth.edu/∼models/ and the Multimission Archive at the Space Telescope Science Institute (MAST; http://archive.stsci.edu).