Photometric metallicities of stars in SkyMapper DR2

Here we present reliable metallicities of ~280000 stars with -3.75<~[Fe/H]<~-0.75 down to g=17 derived using metallicity-sensitive photometry from the second data release of the SkyMapper Southern Survey. We use the dependency of the flux through the SkyMapper v filter on the strength of the CaII K absorption features, in tandem with SkyMapper u, g, i photometry, to derive photometric metallicities for these stars.

We find that metallicities derived in this way compare well to metallicities derived in large-scale spectroscopic surveys, and we use such comparisons to calibrate and quantify systematics as a function of location, reddening, and color. We find good agreement with metallicities from the APOGEE, LAMOST, and GALAH surveys, based on a standard deviation of {sigma}~0.25dex of the residuals of our photometric metallicities with respect to metallicities from those surveys.