Quality Control and
Data Processing

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.

SINFONI

All sinfoni observational modes and techniques are supported by the SINFONI pipeline with exception of the sinfoni sky spider and spectral dithering. The SINFONI pipeline is publicly available here. Under this link you also find the pipeline Users Manual.

CALIBRATION and SCIENCE data

Find the description of SINFONI data processing and pipeline recipes for calibrations here and for science data here.

A useful reference for getting started with SINFONI data reduction is the SINFONI data reduction cookbook.