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.

VISIR part

The VISIR pipeline is publicly available here. Under this link you also find the pipeline Users Manual. It supports data measured both before and after the upgrade.

Raw Data

The VISIR file format after the upgrade, i.e. for P95 (April 2015) and later, has fits files where all data is stored in extensions. The primary header unit is empty:

	imaging	spectroscopy
format (X,Y), 1x1 binning	1024 x 1024 px	1024 x 1024 px
half-cycle frames	no	2 per chopping cycle
integration frame	yes (1 per file, i.e. nodding position)	yes (1 per file, i.e. nodding position)

Pre-upgrade

Pre-upgrade raw files were fits without extensions, detector size was 256 x 256 px.