SIMBAD references

We obtained spectra of 20 bright stars in the southern sky, including Sirius, Canopus, Betelgeuse, Rigel, Bellatrix, and Procyon, using the 1.5-m telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory and its grating spectrograph RCSPEC. A 7.5 magnitude neutral density filter was used to keep from saturating the CCD. Our spectra are tied to a Kurucz model of Sirius with T = 9850 K, log g = 4.30, and [Fe/H] = +0.4. Because Sirius is much less problematic than using Vega as a fundamental calibrator, the synthetic photometry of our stars constitutes a Sirius-based system that could be used as a new anchor for stellar and extragalactic photometric measurements.