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.

SPHERE part

The SPHERE pipeline is publicly available here. Under this link you also find the pipeline User Manual.

IRDIS

IRDIS raw data come as FITS format data cubes with planes of size 2k x 1k and NDIT planes. The 2k x 1k planes contain side by side two images coming from two different optical paths of the IRDIS instrument. So far there is a discontinuity in world coordinates at columns x=1024.
IRDIS Technical PSF calibrator frames (an AO corrected internal lamp fiber image to check the AO performance of the CPI) come with planes of size NAXIS1=2048 and NAXIS2=256.

IFS

IFS raw data come as FITS format data cubes with planes of size 2k x 2k and NDIT planes. The 2k x 2k planes contain either images (e.g. detector flats, dark frames) or integral field spectra (IFU flats).

ZIMPOL

ZIMPOL raw data come as FITS cubes with two extension, one for each optical CCD detector. The raw data are binned resulting in a plane size of NAXIS1=1156 x NAXIS2=1024 pixel for each extension. The number of planes of the cube is even, as NDIT is even. This is because of the special detector operations mode. See SPHERE User Manual and references therein.