Use of the (UK) VISTA Data Flow System

The mean VISTA data volumes are high (estimated ~315GigaByte on a typical night). Individual pawprints extracted from the ESO archive can be passed through a calibration pipeline at Garching that will remove instrumental artefacts, and produce astrometrically and photometrically calibrated single pawprints for the user.

The UK-based VISTA Data Flow System (VDFS) receives a copy of all VISTA raw data by agreement with ESO, and is required to fully respect the proprietary rights assigned by ESO to observations. The VDFS will further combine the pawprints into tiles, extract sources and place these in a VISTA Science Archive where authorised users can interrogate the data and use tools to combine it into survey products. [This sytem is an evolution of that for WFCAM data - including the UKIDSS surveys which ESO members are entitled to access via the WFCAM Science Archive].

Note that data processing by the UK VDFS is not a right (i.e. there is no obligation on the UK to provide this outside the UK) but nevertheless the UK VDFS will process data for others in a spirit of scientific collaboration and public surveys, subject to availability of resources. VISTA users wishing to make use of the UK-based VDFS to handle their survey data processing needs should contact the VDFS project leader to let VDFS know your plans so VDFS can comment on them to avoid mistakes/ misunderstandings.

ESO requires all final Public Survey data products to be delivered to ESO for integration into the ESO archive.

Note that (by default) ESO expect Public survey data to be world public when it is released, as is currently the policy for their existing archives.