The ESO Science Archive is a powerful scientific resource for the entire astronomical community, contributing up to 45% to the overall ESO scientific output, as quantified by refereed publications in international journals. It stores and preserves the raw data generated by all ESO facilities and instruments, and an always growing variety of processed products. It allows the browsing and retrieval of all these data from the La Silla-Paranal Observatory, as well as from ALMA. The processed products come primarily from ESO Public Surveys, Large Programmes, and from the bulk processing of selected instruments carried out by ESO as part of the quality control process. As both astronomical instrumentation and data grow in complexity and volume, managing and reducing raw telescope data becomes a challenge for non-experts. The driving principle of the ESO Phase 3 process, which provides the channel to publish reduced data, is to delegate data reduction to experts while providing the astronomical community at large with ready-to-use products and securing their long-term preservation in the ESO Science Archive. This collaborative effort between the archive and the scientific teams has been in operation since 2011 and delivers numerous benefits to the scientific community and data providers, including enhanced data visibility through Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs), quality certification, long-term data preservation, improved metadata/data characterization and the possibility of providing services and capabilities on top of a homogeneous data archive. In this contribution we highlight the way in which a curated data archive increases the legacy value of the products. We are going to illustrate the Phase3 process and the ESO Science Data Product Standard, a data interface document to which the reduced products must adhere. This standard ensures a uniform data and metadata format. We also present the automated audit process to verify compliance with the standard and the role that the archive team plays in assisting data providers in preparing the products and organizing their submission. We wish to share our experience in involving the community, in providing user support, how the system has been improved and our lessons learned. We conclude by providing an outline of the foreseen future developments.
Scientific data collected at ESO’s observatories are freely and openly accessible online through the ESO Science Archive Facility. In addition to the raw data straight out of the instruments, the ESO Science Archive also contains four million processed science files, and counting, available for use by scientists and astronomy enthusiasts worldwide. ESO subscribes to the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) guiding principles for scientific data management and stewardship. All data in the ESO Science Archive are distributed according to the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence (CC BY 4.0).
The ESO Science Archive offers powerful interfaces through which any user can browse and download its content. The most recent developments [18,19,20,22] consist of the web-based archive science portal and a programmatic interface providing Virtual Observatory (VO) access to the Science Archive. The underlying databases offer a rich set of scientifically characterizing and VO-based metadata to facilitate data discovery [1, 15, and 23 in turn based on 2,5,6,8]. The query results provide access to the identified files together with related ancillary files and information (e.g., previews, weight-maps, data documentation, calibration reference files, etc.). Specific to the programmatic interface, users can explore the structure and content of the archive databases and scientific catalogue tables [4,21], and then write their own queries [3], for an empowered data discovery experience. When downloading the data, users can select the cutout service [16] to retrieve selected spatial and/or spectral subsets instead of the entire datasets. Authentication and authorization allow privileged users to extend their query and download capabilities beyond what is possible to anonymous users. The adoption of Virtual Observatory (VO) standards and technologies has been at the core of the development of the described interfaces. Here below we present the interfaces, and then an analysis of the costs and benefits of utilizing VO technologies in the ESO archive, as well as the lessons learned in the process.
In recent years, we developed two very high speed single photon photometers, Aqueye and Iqueye, as prototypes for “quantum” photometers for the Extremely Large Telescopes of the next decade. These instruments, based on single photon avalanche photodiodes and a 4-fold split-pupil concept, have been successfully used to obtain data of the highest quality on optical pulsars. Subsequently, we performed an attempt to utilize the Orbital Angular Momentum and associated Optical Vorticity to achieve high performance stellar coronagraphy. Presently, we are making a synergic effort in building Aqueye Plus, a new instrument for the 1.8 m telescope of the Asiago - Cima Ekar Observatory, which combines both functions, namely high speed simultaneous multicolor photon counting photometry and stellar coronagraphy. The innovative capability of Aqueye Plus is to take advantage of the two parallel outputs (NIM and TTL) of the four high time accuracy photon counting sensors. The NIM output preserves the best timing capability, while the TTL output drives a deformable 32-element mirror in a sort of quadrant detector to correct for defocus and tip/tilt aberrations of the stellar image on the phase mask discontinuity. This paper describes the Aqueye Plus instrument main characteristics and its foreseen performance.
L. Abe, J.-P. Rivet, A. Agabi, E. Aristidi, D. Mekarnia, I. Goncalves, T. Guillot, M. Barbieri, N. Crouzet, F. Fressin, F.-X. Schmider, Y. Fantei-Caujolle, J.-B. Daban, C. Gouvret, S. Peron, P.-Y. Petit, A. Robini, M. Dugue, E. Bondoux, T. Fruth, A. Erikson, H. Rauer, F. Pont, A. Alapini, S. Aigrain, J. Szulagyi, P.-E. Blanc, A. Le Van Suu
The ASTEP program is dedicated to exo-planet transit search from the Concordia Station located at Dome C, Antarctica.
It comprises two instruments: a fixed 10cm refractor pointed toward the celestial South Pole, and a 400mm Newton
telescope with a 1x1 degree field of view. This work focuses on the latter instrument. It has been installed in November
2009, and has been observing since then during the two polar winters 2010 and 2011. After presenting the main science
observing programs, we review the telescope installation, performance, and describe its operating conditions as well as
the data reduction and handling strategy. The resulting lightcurves are generally very stable and of excellent quality, as
shown by continuous observations of WASP-19 that we present here.
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