We present the photometric calibration of the Swift Ultraviolet/Optical Telescope (UVOT) which includes: optimum photometric and background apertures, effective area curves, colour transformations, conversion factors for count rates to flux and the photometric zero-points (which are accurate to better than 4 per cent) for each of the seven UVOT broad-band filters. The calibration was performed with observations of standard stars and standard star fields that represent a wide range of spectral star types. The calibration results include the position-dependent uniformity, and instrument response over the 1600-8000 Å operational range. Because the UVOT is a photon-counting instrument, we also discuss the effect of coincidence loss on the calibration results. We provide practical guidelines for using the calibration in UVOT data analysis. The results presented here supersede previous calibration results.

We present an ultraviolet color-magnitude diagram (CMD) spanning the hot horizontal branch (HB), blue straggler, and white dwarf populations of the globular cluster NGC 2808. These data were obtained with the far-UV and near-UV cameras on the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS). Although previous optical CMDs of NGC 2808 show a high-temperature gap within the hot HB population, no such gap is evident in our UV CMD. Instead, we Ðnd a population of hot subluminous HB stars, an anomaly only previously reported for the globular cluster u Cen. Our theoretical modeling indicates that the location of these subluminous stars in the UV CMD, as well as the high-temperature gap along the HB in optical CMDs, can be explained if these stars underwent a late helium-core Ñash while descending the white dwarf cooling curve. We show that the convection zone produced by such a late helium Ñash will penetrate into the hydrogen envelope, thereby mixing hydrogen into the hot helium-burning interior, where it is rapidly consumed. This phenomenon is analogous to the "" born again ÏÏ scenario for producing hydrogen-deÐcient stars following a late helium-shell Ñash. The Ñash mixing of the envelope greatly enhances the envelope helium and carbon abundances, and leads, in turn, to a discontinuous increase in the HB e †ective temperatures at the transition between canonical and Ñash-mixed stars. We argue that the hot HB gap is associated with this theoretically predicted dichotomy in the HB properties. Moreover, the changes in the emergent spectral energy distribution caused by these abundance changes are primarily responsible for explaining the hot subluminous HB stars. Although further evidence is needed to conÐrm that a late helium-core Ñash can account for the subluminous HB stars and the hot HB gap, we demonstrate that an understanding of these stars requires the use of appropriate theoretical models for their evolution, atmospheres, and spectra.

We study the "jump" in the blue horizontal-branch (BHB) distribution first detected by Grundahl et al. (1998) in the Galactic globular cluster (GC) M13. On the basis of Strömgren photometry for a sample of fourteen GC's we show that: 1) The jump is best characterized as a systematic shift, on a u, u − y color-magnitude diagram, from canonical zero-age HB (ZAHB) models, in the sense that the stars appear brighter and/or hotter than the models; 2) the jump is a ubiquitous phenomenon, ocurring over the temperature range 11,500 K ≤ T eff ≤ 20,000 K; 3) An analogous feature is present in (log g, log T eff ) diagrams -indicating a common physical origin for the two phenomena; 4) The physical mechanism responsible for the jump phenomenon is most likely radiative levitation of iron and other heavy elements. * Based on data collected at the European Southern Observatory (La Silla, Chile) and the Nordic Optical Telescope, Spain "The Galactic Halo: from Globular Clusters to Field Stars"; 35 rd Liège Int. Astroph. Coll., 1999

Abstract. We present an updated calibration of the Swift/UVOT broadband ultraviolet (uvw1, uvm2, and uvw2) filters. The new calibration accounts for the ~1% per year decline in the UVOT sensitivity observed in all filters, and makes use of additional calibration sources with a wider range of colours and with HST spectrophotometry. In this paper we present the new effective area curves and instrumental photometric zeropoints and compare with the previous calibration.