An accurate new method of calculating absolute magnitudes and K-corrections applied to the Sloan filter set

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This archive contains data in CSV format from Tables 2 to 6 of, "An accurate new method of calculating absolute magnitudes and K-corrections applied to the Sloan filter set", which has been submitted to the "Astrophysical Journal". The 10 tables list second order polynomial coefficients for use in determining absolute magnitudes from observed colors, two alternative colors being given for each of the Sloan u, g, r, i, z-bands, as described in the paper.

We describe an accurate new method for determining absolute magnitudes, and hence also K-corrections, which is simpler than most previous methods, being based on a quadratic function of just one suitably chosen observed color. The method relies on the extensive and accurate new set of 129 empirical galaxy template SEDs from Brown et al. (2014). A key advantage of our method is that we can reliably estimate random errors in computed absolute magnitudes due to galaxy diversity, photometric error and redshift error. We derive K-corrections for the five Sloan Digital Sky Survey filters and provide parameter tables for use by the astronomical community. Using the New York Value-Added Galaxy Catalog we compare our K-corrections with those from kcorrect. Our K-corrections produce absolute magnitudes that are generally in good agreement with kcorrect. Absolute g, r, i, z-band magnitudes differ by less than 0.02 mag, and those in the u-band by ~0.04 mag. The evolution of rest-frame colors as a function of redshift is better behaved using our method, with relatively few galaxies being assigned anomalously red colors and a tight red sequence being observed across the whole 0.0 < z < 0.5 redshift range