Halo Luminosity Function From Photometric Calibration of the Revised NLTT

Abstract

We calibrate the photographic photometry of the revised New Luyten Two-Tenths catalog (rNLTT) by matching 3448 rNLTT stars to the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). The correction is linear in magnitude and goes from zero at V ~ 14 to 0.32 mag at V=19, in the sense that rNLTT was previously too bright. The correction implies that the underlying USNO-A2.0 photometry, on which rNLTT photometry is based, is non-linear. The new calibration somewhat improves the appearance of the (V,V-J) reduced proper motion diagram in the sense of better separation between disk and halo stars. We repeat Gould's analysis of 5000 halo stars in rNLTT. The most important change is to move the peak of the halo luminosity function about 0.5 mag dimmer, from M_V=10.5 to M_V=11, putting it into good agreement with the parallax-based determination of Dahn et al.