VST processing facility: first astronomical applications

TL;DR

VST-Tube is an automated software pipeline that processes raw optical astronomical images into calibrated, co-added images and catalogs, featuring a user-friendly GUI and tools for data management and quality control.

Contribution

This paper introduces VST-Tube, a comprehensive and automated pipeline for optical astronomical image processing with a graphical interface and data management tools.

Findings

Successfully processes raw data into calibrated images and catalogs

Provides tools for data quality assessment and management

Demonstrates pipeline applications with example results

Abstract

VST--Tube is a new software package designed to process optical astronomical images. It is an automated pipeline to go from the raw exposures to fully calibrated co-added images, and to extract catalogs with aperture and PSF photometry. A set of tools allow the data administration and the quality check of the intermediate and final products. VST-Tube comes with a Graphical User Interface to facilitate the interaction between data and user. We outline here the VST--Tube architecture and show some applications enlightening some of the characteristics of the pipeline.