Landolt is an exciting opportunity to enable absolute calibration in astronomy at an unprecedented level. For as long as people have looked up at the night sky, a fundamental question has always been: what is the true brightness of that star? Even with today’s modern instruments, true brightness calibration has only been good to a few percent, and Landolt will enable an improvement by more than a factor of 10. Understanding the true brightness of stars allows to understand the stars better – and, perhaps more importantly, understand the planets that orbit the stars better. Landolt has the opportunity to change astronomy for the relatively minimal cost of a PIONEER program.
