The Charge Transfer Efficiency and Calibration of WFPC2

Abstract

A new determination of WFPC2 photometric corrections is presented, using HSTphot reduction of the WFPC2 Omega Centauri and NGC 2419 observations from January 1994 through March 2000 and a comparison with ground-based photometry. No evidence is seen for any position-independent photometric offsets (the "long-short anomaly"); all systematic errors appear to be corrected with the CTE and zero point solution. The CTE loss time dependence is determined to be very significant in the Y direction, causing time-independent CTE solutions (Stetson 1998; Saha, Lambert, & Prosser 2000) to be valid only for a small range of times. On average, the present solution produces corrections similar to Whitmore, Heyer, & Casertano (1999), although with an improved functional form that produces less scatter in the residuals and determined with roughly a year of additional data. In addition to the CTE loss characterization, zero point corrections are also determined as functions of chip, gain, filter, and temperature. Of interest, there are chip-to-chip differences of order 0.01-0.02 magnitudes relative to the Holtzman et al. (1995) calibrations, and the present study provides empirical zero point determinations for the non-standard filters such as the frequently-used F450W, F606W, and F702W.