Showing papers by "Edwin A. Valentijn published in 2001"

Observing and Data Mining with OmegaCAM.

Abstract: OmegaCAM is a 16k × 16k optical camera currently built for ESO’s VLT Survey Telescope the VST. The instrument will produce dozens of Terabytes/year of raw science and calibration data. Although the instrument will be used for individual science programmes, in about two years of operations it will have observed an area of the sky as large as the ESO-Schmidt survey of the Southern hemisphere. The data will be pre-processed at ESO headquarters, resulting into calibrated images that will be shipped to the user. In turn to obtain and verify the final result, the user needs access to additional back-end processing tools and to the raw and processed calibration data. The OmegaCAM design has strictly procedurized the observing and data reduction methods to aid the definition of the classes of data flowing from Paranal and ESO headquarters to the national data centers and the end users. Within the ESO environment the system will have to match to ESO’s Data Flow System and its pipeline infrastructure. In this system the glue between ESO’s centralized front-end processing and the users decentralized back-end processing is provided by the Python scripting language, used both by the programmers and the end users, and an object oriented database approach, which can in turn be hosted by Python.