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What is the meaning of the Quality Control (QC) grade

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General Classification Rules

Quality Control of OBs executed in Service Mode will be based on the specified constraints in the OB for airmass, atmospheric transparency, image quality/seeing, moon constraints, twilight constraint, as well as Strehl ratio for Adaptive Optics mode observations (as requested). If all constraints are fulfilled the OB will get assigned Quality Control grade "A", while the "B" quality control is assigned if some constraint is up to 10% violated. The observations with quality control grades A or B are completed, while those with quality control grade "C" (out of constraints) will be re-scheduled and may be repeated. In exceptional cases an OB may get status completed with quality grade "D", meaning that it was executed out of constraints but will not be repeated.

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Note: for most instruments the image quality constraint as defined in the OB is judged against the full width at half maximum (FWHM) of a point source in the resulting image (or spectral image). For the instruments where the image quality cannot be directly measured (AO, VLTI, fibre instrument), it is either not used for classification or is obtained from the wavefront sensor of the active optics of the telescope.

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Special Note for UT4 OB Classification Rules

Ellipticity was detected in some HAWK-I and MUSE observations from 07 May 2017 onwards when pointing away from the wind. The problem is under investigation and not yet understood.  In the interrim there is an additional criterion imposed during OB classification, related to elongation, defined as 100*(1-B/A)%, where A and B are the FWHM on the major and minor axes, respectively.

  • For HAWK-I:

    • A. If elongation < 10% for most stars

    • B. If 10% < elongation < 20% for most stars

    • C. If 20% > elongation for most stars 

  • For MUSE:

    • If there are stellar objects in the reconstructed cube FoV, adopt HAWKI criteria.

    • If there are no stellar objects in the reconstructed cube FoV, use the SGS (slow guidance sensor) with criteria as above, but relaxed to 15% and 25% to account for the SGS distortions

    • If there are no stellar objects in the FoV or SGS the classification is based only on the average FWHM on the auto-guider.

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