Quality Control and
Data Processing

General information

PIPELINES AT ESO

Pipelines are used at ESO to process both calibration data and science data and to retrieve quality information. There is a dedicated pipeline for each VLT and VLTI instrument. Find general information about ESO reduction pipelines here.

FUNCTIONALITIES

The main functionalities of the pipelines are:

• create master calibration data,
• reduce science frames,
• extract QC information from the data.

For selected instrument modes, we offer science-grade data products processed with the pipelines.

OPERATIONS

There are two instances of the data reduction pipelines:

• at the instrument workstation on Paranal, running in automatic mode,
• at HQ Garching, run by the Quality Control Group in the optimized mode.

The optimized mode is the mode, which uses all data of a night, including the daytime calibrations. The calibration data are sorted and grouped according to their dependencies. Master calibration data are created. Their quality is checked.

OMEGACAM part

The OmegaCAM data processing pipeline is operational since June 2011 (during OmegaCAM commissioning). It is not publicly available.

CALIBRATION and SCIENCE data

All of OmegaCAM calibrations are acquired and reduced according the OmegaCAM calibration plan. The calibration cascade is given below:

OmegaCAM's only observing mode is imaging.

The pipeline supports all types of calibrations of the calibration plan. There is also a science recipe which reduces science images to the coadded (stacked) level.

RAW DATA

The OmegaCAM detector mosaic is equipped with 32 e2v blue-sensitve 2048 x 4200 pixel detectors. OmegaCAM raw frames come as fits frames with one primary header and 32 extensions (i.e. MEF), each of which consists of a header containing detector specific information and pixel data.

PRODUCT FILES

Pipeline products have can have two formats:

• Fits frames with one primary header and 16 extensions each one consisting of an extension header and pixel data.
• Fits files with one primary header and 16 extensions each one consisting of an extension header and a binary table (e.g. zeropoints and photometric fits tables)