Analytical approximations of K-corrections in optical and near-infrared
  bands
  To compare photometric properties of galaxies at different redshifts, the
fluxes need to be corrected for the changes of effective rest-frame wavelengths
of filter bandpasses, called K-corrections. Usual approaches to compute them
are based on the template fitting of observed spectral energy distributions
(SED) and, thus, require multi-colour photometry. Here, we demonstrate that, in
cases of widely used optical and near-infrared filters, K-corrections can be
precisely approximated as two-dimensional low-order polynomials of only two
parameters: redshift and one observed colour. With this minimalist approach, we
present the polynomial fitting functions for K-corrections in SDSS ugriz, UKIRT
WFCAM YJHK, Johnson-Cousins UBVR_cI_c, and 2MASS JHK_s bands for galaxies at
redshifts Z<0.5 based on empirically-computed values obtained by fitting
combined optical-NIR SEDs of a set of 10^5 galaxies constructed from SDSS DR7
and UKIDSS DR5 photometry using the Virtual Observatory. For luminous red
galaxies we provide K-corrections as functions of their redshifts only. In two
filters, g and r, we validate our solutions by computing K-corrections directly
from SDSS DR7 spectra. We also present a K-corrections calculator, a web-based
service for computing K-corrections on-line.
