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.

UVES part

The UVES pipeline was originally written as a MIDAS context. It then was extended to support FLAMES/UVES data. In 2007 it was ported to the ESO Common Pipeline Library framework supporting both UVES and FLAMES/UVES data. In 2011 Reflex Workflows for UVES were implemented. The latest CPL version (both in standalone and integrated into Reflex) of the pipeline together with documentation (including User manuals and a Reflex tutorial) and test/example datasets are available here.