The measurement of precise absolute fluxes for stellar sources has been pursued with increased vigor since the discovery of the dark energy and the realization that its detailed understanding requires accurate spectral energy distributions (SEDs) of redshifted Ia supernovae in the rest frame. The flux distributions of spectrophotometric standard stars were initially derived from the comparison of stars to laboratory sources of known flux but are now mostly based on calculated model atmospheres. For example, pure hydrogen white dwarf (WD) models provide the basis for the HST CALSPEC archive of flux standards. The basic equations for quantitative spectrophotometry and photometry are explained in detail. Several historical lab based flux calibrations are reviewed; and the SEDs of stars in the major on-line astronomical databases are compared to the CALSPEC reference standard spectrophotometry. There is good evidence that relative fluxes from the visible to the near-IR wavelength of ∼2.5 µm are currently accurate to 1% for the primary reference standards; and new comparisons with lab flux standards show promise for improving that precision.

We present optical spectroscopy and near-infrared photometry of 126 cool white dwarfs (WDs) in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). Our sample includes high proper motion targets selected using the SDSS and USNO-B astrometry and a dozen previously known ultracool WD candidates. Our optical spectroscopic observations demonstrate that a clean selection of large samples of cool WDs in the SDSS (and the SkyMapper, Pan-STARRS, and the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope data sets) is possible using a reduced proper motion diagram and a tangential velocity cut-off (depending on the proper motion accuracy) of 30 km s −1 . Our near-infrared observations reveal eight new stars with significant absorption. We use the optical and near-infrared photometry to perform a detailed model atmosphere analysis. More than 80% of the stars in our sample are consistent with either pure hydrogen or pure helium atmospheres. However, the eight stars with significant infrared absorption and the majority of the previously known ultracool WD candidates are best explained with mixed hydrogen and helium atmosphere models. The age distribution of our sample is consistent with a Galactic disk age of 8 Gyr. A few ultracool WDs may be as old as 12-13 Gyr, but our models have problems matching the spectral energy distributions of these objects. There are only two halo WD candidates in our sample. However, trigonometric parallax observations are required for accurate mass and age determinations and to confirm their membership in the halo.

We present the second public data release of the Dark Energy Survey, DES DR2, based on optical/near-infrared imaging by the Dark Energy Camera mounted on the 4 m Blanco telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile. DES DR2 consists of reduced single-epoch and coadded images, a source catalog derived from coadded images, and associated data products assembled from 6 yr of DES science operations. This release includes data from the DES wide-area survey covering ∼5000 deg 2 of the southern Galactic cap in five broad photometric bands, grizY. DES DR2 has a median delivered point-spread function FWHM of g = 1.11″, r = 0.95″, i = 0.88″, z = 0.83″, and Y = 0 90, photometric uniformity with a standard deviation of < 3 mmag with respect to Gaia DR2 G band, a photometric accuracy of ∼11 mmag, and a median internal astrometric precision of ∼27 mas. The median coadded catalog depth for a 1 95 diameter aperture at signal-to-noise ratio = 10 is g = 24.7, r = 24.4, i = 23.8, z = 23.1, and Y = 21.7 mag. DES DR2 includes ∼691 million distinct astronomical objects detected in 10,169 coadded image tiles of size 0.534 deg 2 produced from 76,217 single-epoch images. After a basic quality selection, benchmark galaxy and stellar samples contain 543 million and 145 million objects, respectively. These data are accessible through several interfaces, including interactive image visualization tools, web-based query clients, image cutout servers, and Jupyter notebooks. DES DR2 constitutes the largest photometric data set to date at the achieved depth and photometric precision.

The surface gravities of cool (T eff < 13 000 K) hydrogen-atmosphere DA white dwarfs, determined from spectroscopic analyses, are found to be significantly higher than the canonical value of log g ∼ 8 expected for these stars. It was recently concluded that a problem with the treatment of convective energy transport within the framework of the mixing-length theory was the most plausible explanation for this high-log g problem. We pursue the investigation of this discrepancy by computing model spectra of cool convective white dwarfs from a small sequence (11 300 K < T eff < 12 800 K) of 3D hydrodynamical model atmospheres, which feature a sophisticated treatment of convection and radiative transfer. Our approach is to proceed with a differential analysis between 3D and standard 1D models. We find that the 3D spectra predict significantly lower surface gravities, with corrections of the right amplitude as a function of effective temperature to obtain values of log g ∼ 8 on average. We conclude that the surface gravity distribution of cool convective DA white dwarfs is much closer to that of hotter radiative objects when using, for the treatment of the convection, 3D models instead of the mixing-length framework.