ESO
SINFONI Pipeline User Manual
Doc:
VLT-MAN-ESO-19500-3600
Issue:
Issue 1.0
Date:
Date 2005-10-19
Page:
13 of 88
2
Overview
In collaboration with instrument consortia, the Data Flow Systems Department (DFS) of the Data Manage-
ment and Operation Division is implementing data reduction pipelines for the most commonly used VLT/VLTI
instrument modes. These data reduction pipelines have the following three main purposes:
Data quality control: pipelines are used to produce the quantitative information necessary to monitor instru-
ment performance.
Master calibration product creation: pipelines are used to produce master calibration products (e.g., com-
bined bias frames, super-flats, wavelength dispersion solutions).
Science product creation: using pipeline-generated master calibration products, science products are produced
for the supported instrument modes (e.g., combined ISAAC jitter stacks; bias-corrected, flat-fielded FORS
images, wavelength-calibrated UVES spectra). The accuracy of the science products is limited by the
quality of the available master calibration products and by the algorithmic implementation of the pipelines
themselves. In particular, adopted automatic reduction strategies may not be suitable or optimal for all
scientific goals.
Instrument pipelines consist of a set of data processing modules that can be called from the command line, from
the automatic data management tools available on Paranal or from Gasgano.
ESO offers two front-end applications for launching pipeline recipes, Gasgano [14] and EsoRex, both included
in the pipeline distribution (see Appendix A, page 85). These applications can also be downloaded separately
from
http://www.eso.org/gasgano
and
http://www.eso.org/cpl/esorex.html
. An il-
lustrated introduction to Gasgano is provided in the "Quick Start" Section of this manual (see page 16).
The SINFONI instrument and the different types of SINFONI raw frames and auxilliary data are described in
Sections 3, 6, and 7.
A brief introduction to the usage of the available reduction recipes using Gasgano or EsoRex is presented
in Section 4. In section 5 we advice the user about known data reduction problems providing also possible
solutions.
An overview of the data reduction, what are the input data, and the recipes involved in the calibration cascade
is provided in section 8.
More details on what are inputs, products, quality control measured quantities, and controlling parameters of
each recipe is given in section 9.
More detailed descriptions of the data reduction algorithms used by the individual pipeline recipes can be found
in Section 10.
In Appendix A the installation of the SINFONI pipeline recipes is described and in Appendix B a list of used
abbreviations and acronyms is given.
