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.

VIRCAM part

The VIRCAM pipeline is publicly available here. Under this link you also find the pipeline Users Manual.

RAW DATA

VIRCAM is equipped with 16 2k x 2k NIR detectors.

RAW DATA EXTENSIONS

Raw data come as FITS files with one header unit and 16 extensions, each fits extension contains a detector specific header and the counts of the 2k x 2k pixel.

Since the VIRCAM detector controllers are configured to sum up the counts of each NDIT exposure (instead of averaging on the chip), accumulated counts in a saved frame correspond to an exposure time of NDIT times DIT.