| Summary: | The Balloon-borne Large Aperture Submillimeter Telescope (BLAST) operated successfully during a 250 hr flight over Antarctica in 2006 December (BLAST06). As part of the calibration and pointing procedures, the red hypergiant star VY CMa was observed and used as the primary calibrator. Details of the overall BLAST06 calibration procedure are discussed. The 1σ uncertainty on the absolute calibration is accurate to 9.5%, 8.7%, and 9.2% at the 250, 350, and 500 μm bands, respectively. The errors are highly correlated between bands resulting in much lower errors for the derived shape of the 250-500 μm continuum. The overall pointing error is < 5'' rms for the 36'', 42'', and 60'' beams. The performance of optics and pointing systems is discussed. © 2009 American Astronomical Society. Print publication: Issue 2 (2009 December 20); received 2009 April 6; accepted for publication 2009 September 30; published 2009 December 7. We acknowledge the support of NASA through grant Nos. NAG5-12785, NAG5-13301, and NNGO-6GI11G, the NSF Office of Polar Programs, the Canadian Space Agency, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) of Canada, and the UK Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC).We thank D. Dowell, T. Jenness, and J. Aguirre for their data. This research has been enabled by the use of WestGrid computing resources. This research also made use of the SIMBAD database, operated at the CDS, France, and the NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database (NED), operated by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, under contract with NASA. Published - Truch2009p6667Astrophys_J.pdf
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