2016AJ....152...53B

We describe the development and application of a Global Astrometric Solution (GAS) to the problem of Pan-STARRS1 (PS1) astrometry. Current PS1 astrometry is based on differential astrometric measurements using 2MASS reference stars, and thus PS1 astrometry inherits the errors of the 2MASS catalog. The GAS, based on a single, least-squares adjustment to approximately 750 k "grid stars" using over 3000 extragalactic objects as reference objects, avoids this catalog-to-catalog propagation of errors to a great extent. The GAS uses a relatively small number of quasi-stellar objects (QSOs, or distant active galactic nuclei) with very accurate (<1 mas) radio positions, referenced to the ICRF2. These QSOs provide a hard constraint in the global least-squares adjustment. Solving such a system provides absolute astrometry for all of the stars simultaneously. The concept is much cleaner than conventional astrometry but is not easy to perform for large catalogs. In this paper, we describe our method and its application to Pan-STARRS1 data. We show that large-scale systematic errors are easily corrected but our solution residuals for position (∼60 mas) are still larger than expected based on simulations (∼10 mas). We provide a likely explanation for the reason the small-scale residual errors are not corrected in our solution as would be expected.