QC1 Performance Monitoring
The purpose of the Quality Control level 1 (QC1) process is
- Performance assessment of the Paranal instruments by means of monitoring calibration data.
- Producing certified master calibrations, ingested and publically available in the ESO archive.
- Assessing the completeness and quality of a calibration dataset for reducing a science observation.
The QC1 process uses ESO's instrument specific data reduction pipelines to produce master calibration frames aka pipeline products. Master calibration frames are characterized by QC parameters, whose values are produced by algorithms wthin the pipeline recipes. The QC parameters are available in the fits header of the pipeline products and described in the respective pipeline manuals. The QC1 parameters are extracted from the headers and inserted into the QC1 database. The QC1 database is the source for the performance monitoring plots: Health Check monitor.
Instrument calibrations are done on a daily basis according to calibration plan for each instrument mode. In addition, a subset of calibrations is taken for health check purposes. The calibration plan for each instrument is described in the respective user manuals linked from the instrument specific info pages (note that this linked table needs to be updated for "calibrations").