This page provides information about pipeline processing and data types.

Raw data are selected, associated and inserted into a reduction mechanism which produces calibration products, science products and quality control information. This mechanism is the data processing pipeline. There is one such pipeline for each VLT and VLTI instrument.

Find general information about ESO reduction pipelines here.

The main functionalities of the pipelines are:

• create master calibration data,
• reduce science frames,
• extract QC information from the data.

QC Garching creates master calibration data from all raw calibration data. The raw data are stored in the ESO Archive and are public. They are quality-checked and used for data reduction and for trending.

Before October 2011 QC Garching processed science data, using the best available, quality-checked master calibration data. As of October 2011 this service is not offered anymore.

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 automatic mode is used for quick look purposes and for on-site quality control. It processes all raw data sequentially, as they arrive from the instrument. If calibration products ("master calibrations") are required for processing science data, these are taken from a database with standard, pre-manufactured calibration products. The automatic mode is not tuned to obtain the best possible results.

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.

The reduction of VISIR data at QC Garching is done in a semi-automatic manner: raw data are selected and inserted into a reduction mechanism which produces:

• calibration products and
• reduced science data.

This mechanism is the VISIR reduction pipeline.

The VISIR pipeline consists of a number of recipes. They are based on the ESO Common Pipeline Library (CPL).

The VISIR pipeline presently supports most offered modes, except for BURST and RASTER.

QC Garching processes the following VISIR data:

• all pipeline supported calibration data taken with VISIR no matter whether in Service or Visitor Mode. Some of the calibrations taken for technical reasons (DPR.CATG = TECHNICAL or TEST) are also processed.
• all science data taken in VISIR supported modes taken in Service Mode. (As of October 2011 the science data are no longer processed)
  

All VISIR imaging and spectroscopic raw frames come in the following format:

• HIERARCH ESO DET CHIP ID = Visir
• HIERARCH ESO DET CHIP NAME = DRS_SiAs_256x256
• HIERARCH ESO DET CHIP NX = 256
• HIERARCH ESO DET CHIP NY = 256
• HIERARCH ESO DET CHIP TYPE = MIR

Packages with the data of the Service Mode runs executed prior to October 2011 (Period 87) were sent on DVDs. Otherwise, the packages are available to PIs via the User Portal. They contain

• all raw science data,
• reduced science data,
• associated calibration products,
• associated raw calibration data,
• listings and logs,
• QC reports and OB reports.

  Data packages