The VISTA Data Flow System

Abstract

The Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy (VISTA) is a new ESO telescope that will be commissioned in late 2007. The telescope has been specifically designed for survey work in both the visible and near infrared, but to start with will only have an infrared camera (VIRCAM). The focal plane of VIRCAM will consist of 16 2k by 2k non-buttable detectors with a pawprint of 0.6 square degrees. With an expected nightly data rate of 200–500 Gb, automated pipeline processing and data management requirements are paramount.

Pipeline processing of IR data is far more technically challenging than for optical data. IR detectors are inherently more unstable and the sky emission is over 100 times brighter than most objects of interest and varies in a complex spatial and temporal manner. In this presentation we describe the pipeline architecture developed to deal with the IR imaging data from VISTA. We discuss the issues involving robustly removing instrumental signatures, sky correction, astrometric and photometric calibration. We also describe some of the checks that have been put in place to monitor data quality and system integrity.