ESO Public Surveys: Phase 2

As for all observing programmes observed in service mode at ESO telescopes, the approved imaging Public Surveys have to go through Phase 2, within which the observation blocks (OBs, i.e. the elementary observation units) are defined and submitted to ESO. These OBs together with their ancillary material, such as README file, are used to schedule and execute the observations on VISTA and VST telescopes.

The Spectroscopic Public Surveys starting in 2012 will be run in visitor mode. Two Public Spectroscopic Surveys have been approved, one using FLAMES on VLT UT2 telescope and the other using EFOSC2 and SOFI on NTT.

This page gives generic information and links for Phase 2 tools specifically developed for Public Surveys by ESO. Detailed information on Phase 2 policies and guidelines on the preparation and submission of Phase 2 material is provided on Phase 2 web pages.

  • VISTA and VIRCAM
  • VST and OmegaCAM
  • Phase 2 tools

The new tools for Phase 2 for Public Surveys were presented to the survey teams during a Phase 2 workshop held at ESO Garching in September 2008. A short description of these tools and the summary of the workshop with the Survey PIs was published in an article in the ESO Messenger (2008, Msng. 134, 42) .

VISTA and VIRCAM

A description of the VISTA project and its status at the end of 2006 is available from the ESO messenger article by Emerson et al. 2006.

 VISTA field of view
  The VIRCAM detector plane, with the moon superimposed for scale

VST and OmegaCAM

The wide field camera at the SPIE 2004 and the Secondary standardprogram for OmegaCAM are presented in thefollowing two articles: Kujken2004 and Kleijn et al. 2007.

The following pages provide information useful for preparation of observations with OmegaCAM and VST:

 VISTA field of view
  A real image from the Omegacam laboratory tests. The field of view is demonstrated by superimposing an image of the moon.

Phase 2 tools

The generation of a very large number of OBs for the Public Survey programmes has been simplified by separating it into two parts: first is the preparation of the geometry of the survey using the Survey Area Definition Tool (SADT), and the second is the preparation of the observation strategy using the ESO Phase 2 Proposal Preparation (P2PP) Tool version 3 (for Surveys). These tools can be downloaded from the links below, where also manuals, installation instructions and additional information is provided.