Quality Control and Trend analysis

Trending means following the evolution of data and instrument quality with time.

The main goals of ESO data quality control (QC) are:

• to know the instrument status (health checks)
• to monitor it over time (trending)
• to deliver data of known and defined quality (certification).

The QC process uses data processing pipelines. These support all VLT/VLTI instruments and all major modes. More ...

The ESO QC process is a distributed process. Currently data delivery to ESO headquarters in Garching takes 10 days on average. Therefore the most fundamental QC checks (so-called QC0) must be done on-site and in near-real time, by the daytime and night-time astronomers. They are supported by the Health Check monitor.

More complete and in-depth checks (QC1, trending) are done at ESO headquarters in Garching by the Quality Control Group. The complete trending history of each VLT instrument is also maintained here.

Go to the above links for instrument specific information about trending and QC.