Introduction

ESO-MIDAS ^1.1is the acronym for the European Southern Observatory - Munich Image Data Analysis System which is developed and maintained by the European Southern Observatory. The official name, ESO-MIDAS, is a registered trademark. In this manual the name MIDAS is used as an abbreviation of ESO-MIDAS. The MIDAS system provides general tools for image processing and data reduction with emphasis on astronomical applications including special reduction packages for ESO instruments at La Silla. The system is available for both VAX/VMS and UNIX systems.

A large number of contributions have been made to MIDAS by people inside and outside ESO. We greatly appreciate and acknowledge these efforts. A full list of acknowledgements can be found in Appendix B.

This manual gives the necessary information to do useful data reduction with the system, whereas a detailed technical description of the design and software interfaces can be found in other documents (see Section 1.6). These documents also describe how users can write and add their own application programs to the system.