QC PLOTS
	CURRENT	HISTORY
fibre availability :
fibre efficiency:
QC1 database (advanced users): browse | plot
Click on CURRENT to see the current trending (Health Check).    Click on HISTORY to see the historical evolution of the trending.

The fibre system of FLAMES contains five slits for Giraffe and one for UVES-FIBRE. The Giraffe fibre system has the two slits Medusa1 and Medusa2 with 135 freely allocatable fibres each, the IFU1 and IFU2 slits with 320 fibres each, organized in 15 subgroups of little deployable IFUs, and the Argus slit with a single IFU of again 320 fibres. In total, there are 1230 Giraffe fibres (see details here).

The calibration of fibre properties is done through the fibre flats. The fibre flats are obtained by a robotic calibration lamp which illuminates the fibres when they are configured in a spiral pattern. While this gives good results for the Medusa and IFU fibre systems, the Argus fibre set is not properly illuminated and is therefore calibrated in addition with nasmyth screen flats.

While all science setups taken during the night receive during the following day a set of at least three such fibre flats, there is also a set of dedicated health check (HC) flats which are taken at regular intervals and used to monitor the fibre performance. They always use the L543.1 setting. The Medusa HC flats are taken every 3rd day. The IFU and Argus HC flats have been added in 2006 and are taken once a week. These HC flats always come as a single raw file.

These data are quality-controlled and trended on the Health Check monitor to check

• the fibre availability (to detect broken or unallocated fibres),
• the quality of the pipeline localization solution (number of fibres found),
• the fibre-to-fibre efficiency (stability of fibre transmission),
• and the quality of illumination by the calibration lamp.
  

Find the performance monitoring of the flat calibration lamp here.

The fibre availability plot monitors the number of illuminated fibres in the Health check setup ("Health") and, for comparison, also in all setups ("all").

QC1 parameters

parameter	QC1 database: table, name	procedure
number of fibres	giraffe_flat..num_fib	total number of fibres as detected by the pipeline
type of flat	giraffe_flat..flattype	here: always ROB = robotic

Trending

The trending plot follows the number of fibres found by the pipeline. The "Health" plot has the HC data only, the "all" plot has all measured data (HC and calibration plan). Usually the "all" plot will have the same, or almost the same number of fibres and just show a denser time coverage. The signal from the last few fibres usually does not fall completely onto the CCD, and is truncated by the pipeline. Depending on wavelength, the index of the last complete fibre may vary.

Another reason for changes of this number may be a broken (or fixed) fibre.

The plot is particularly important for the Medusa fibre systems since they point the fibres to individual targets. A missing fibre means a missing target. For the IFU and the Argus system, a missing fibre results in a missing spatial pixel.

Number of fibres located in Medusa1 HC files.

You can find an overview of the arrangement of the fibres here.

History

This overview is incomplete since it does not cover years 2003-2006.

Check also out here.

The fibre efficiency is monitored with data from the pipeline product with pro.catg "FF_EXTSPECTRA". This has a binary table extension with columns, FPS and TRANSMISSION (check out here for a description of the pipeline-produced binary tables). The FPS is the fibre position index, a number which identifies uniquely each fibre per slit. TRANSMISSION is a number obtained by collapsing the chromatic efficiency per fibre and normalizing it to the brightest fibre (SIMCAL fibres are always set to one). The transmission numbers mostly are between 0.6 and 1.0.

Trending

There is one trending plot per fibre system. All extracted fibre efficiencies are normalized to the brightest fibre and diplayed as a vector "all mean efficiencies". Their rms differences are calculated and displayed in box 2 ("RMS").

Some care has to be taken with the interpretation of the RMS results. There might be differences induced by illumination changes (like in the example below). They can be recognized by coherent changes of a group of fibres. Then, there is real scatter since certain fibres show a larger instability than others.

Normalized fibre efficiency. Top:all values plotted on top of each other Bottom: related RMS values The red lines mark the SIMCAL fibres which are always set to one. The efficiencies are normalized to the brightest (non-SIMCAL) fibre. Zero efficiency means fibre is broken. The RMS plot color-codes the values below 3% green, the obnes above red.

A second plot shows the same data, as 2D display. This plot is powerful to detect patterns, like the illumination defect for the first ~10 fibres for some time. Such effects corrupt the RMS plot in the sense that those fibres are not intrinsically unstable but have been illuminated improperly.

Normalized fibre efficiency, 2D plot. All efficiency vectors are stacked, time increases vertically (tick marks for every 5th vector). The X axis is fibre index FPS, with tick marks for the SIMCAL fibres.

The trending pages include links to numerical data:

• "details per fibre" with the mean numbers per fibre, including a flag marking SIMCAL, SKY fibres, as well as those with rms >1% and >3%, and those without a signal
• "measurements" with a list of all entries (date of acquisition, file name, information about missing fibres).

Here is a list of unstable fibres for the Medusa slits (if possible these ones should be avoided for sky measurements):

Most fibres are stable at a level much better than 1%.

The IFU slits show some bundles of fibres with lower-than-average (but still stable) transmission.

The Argus slit shows a rather uneven illumination in the robotic flats (but a remarkable stability of fibre bundle transmission).