Calibration of Complementary Metal-oxide-semiconductor Sensor–based Photometry to a Few-millimagnitude Precision: The Case of the Mini-SiTian Array

作者：Kai Xiao, Yang Huang, Haibo Yuan, Zhirui Li, Yongkang Sun, Timothy C. Beers, Min He, Jifeng Liu, Hong Wu, Yongna Mao, Bowen Huang, Mingyang Ma, Chuanjie Zheng, Hongrui Gu, Beichuan Wang, Lin Yang, Shuai Xu · 发表于：The Astrophysical Journal Letters · 年份：2025 · DOI：10.3847/2041-8213/adbd3c · 被引用次数：7 · 研究领域：Calibration and Measurement Techniques、CCD and CMOS Imaging Sensors、Infrared Target Detection Methodologies

Abstract We present a pioneering achievement in the high-precision photometric calibration of CMOS-based photometry, by application of the Gaia Blue Photometer or Red Photometer (XP) spectra–based synthetic photometry method to the mini-SiTian array (MST) photometry. Through 79 repeated observations of the f02 field on the night, we find good internal consistency in the calibrated MST G MST -band magnitudes for relatively bright stars, with a precision of about 4 mmag for G MST ∼ 13. Results from more than 30 different nights (over 3100 observations) further confirm this internal consistency, indicating that the 4 mmag precision is stable and achievable over timescales of months. An independent external validation using spectroscopic data from the Large Sky Area Multi-Object Fiber Spectroscopic Telescope DR10 and high-precision photometric data using CCDs from Gaia DR3 reveals a zero-point consistency better than 1 mmag. Our results clearly demonstrate that CMOS photometry is on par with CCD photometry for high-precision results, highlighting the significant capabilities of CMOS cameras in astronomical observations, especially for large-scale telescope survey arrays.