The Data Flow Operations Group of ESO in Garching, provides many aspects of data management and quality control of the VLT data flow. One of the main responsibilities is to monitor the performance of all operational instruments. We have investigated if the statistical methods of process control can be applied to the quality control of the VLT instruments and the data flow has been analyzed in this concern. The efficiency of these statistical methods is found to be related to the calibration plan, that determines the sampling size and frequency of calibrations. We apply these principles to ISAAC health check plots and give examples to demonstrate performance and limitations.

Date Published: 16 September 2004
PDF: 11 pages
Proc. SPIE 5493, Optimizing Scientific Return for Astronomy through Information Technologies, (16 September 2004); doi: 10.1117/12.551099

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 5493:
Optimizing Scientific Return for Astronomy through Information Technologies
Peter J. Quinn; Alan Bridger, Editor(s)