The Monster catalog

The Monster is a whole-sky catalog built specifically for LSST.

The Monster combines data from multiple previous reference catalogs, including Dark Energy Survey, Pan-STARRS, and Gaia, and contains only stellar sources. No prior reference catalog had both the depth and coverage needed to calibrate LSST data. Both photometric and astrometric calibration make use of The Monster.

For details about how the catalog was created, see “The Monster: A reference catalog with synthetic ugrizy-band fluxes for the Vera C. Rubin observatory” (dmtn-277.lsst.io).