About the ESO Pipelines

In collaboration with the various instrument consortia, the Pipeline Systems Group has undertaken to implement data reduction pipelines for the most commonly used VLT/VLTI instrument modes. These data reduction pipelines have three main purposes:

• Data quality control - pipelines are used to produce the quantitative information necessary to monitor instrument performance (see the ESO Quality Control web pages for more information).
• Master calibration product creation - pipelines are used to produce master calibration products (e.g. combined bias frames, super-flats, wavelength dispersion solutions).
• Science product creation - using pipeline-generated master calibration products, science products are produced for 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 can be limited both by the quality of the available master calibration products and by the algorithmic implementation of the pipelines themselves. In particular, adopted reduction strategies may not be suitable for all scientific goals. Therefore, ESO assumes no responsibility for the usefulness of reduced data for any specific scientific project.