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VISTA Data Flow System

The VISTA Data Flow System is an STFC funded activity to provide the pipeline and archiving necessary to allow the vast data rates from VISTA and WFCAM (as an earlier testbed) to be handled to allow the UK astronomical community to readily extract science from the data.

The VDFS project will deliver

1) To the telescope operators: a system for evaluating data quality and producing quick look calibrated data at/near the telescope.

2) A science processing pipeline based in Cambridge delivering fully calibrated science ready products

3) To the UK community: a science archive, integrated with the Virtual Observatory through AstroGrid, which will maintain survey products, including catalogs, to enable science to be readily done with the survey data. Here are the UK User Requirements

The Cambridge Astronomical Survey Unit (CASU) are responsible for delivering the at/near telescope data quality control products/tools and for the processing pipelines including astrometric and photometric calibration of each night's data.

The Wide Field Astronomy Unit (WFAU) in Edinburgh receive the calibrated data from each night, and associated catalogues and ingest it into a database driven archive. As well as enabling access to the data products received from CASU it will generate further products based on many nights data (e.g. coadded to go deeper, or over large areas).

The released VISTA system documentation for VDFS can be found here.