The Monster: a southern reference catalog with synthetic ugrizy fluxes for the Vera C. Rubin observatory

Abstract

In order to facilitate bootstrap photometric calibrations of early Rubin Observatory data we have created the Monster. This reference catalog uses a ranked order set of other reference catalogs to generate synthetic ugrizy fluxes that can be used calibrate images processed with the LSST science pipelines. This document describes the methodology used to create the Monster, documents the input reference catalogs, and performs basic data validation the Monster reference catalog.