Astro-WISE processing of wide-field images and other data

Astro-WISE1 (Vriend et al. 2012) is the Astronomical Wide-field Imaging System for Europe (Valentijn et al. 2007). It is a scientific information system which consists of hardware and software federated over about a dozen institutes throughout Europe. It has been developed to exploit the ever increasing avalanche of data produced by astronomical surveys and data intensive scientific experiments in general. The demo explains the architecture of the Astro-WISE information system and shows the use of Astro-WISE interfaces. Wide-field astronomical images are derived from the raw image to the final catalog according to the user’s request. The demo is based on the standard Astro-WISE guided tour, which can be accessed from the AstroWISE website. The typical Astro-WISE data processing chain is shown, which can be used for data handling for a variety of different instruments, currently 14, including OmegaCAM, MegaCam, WFI, WFC, ACS/HST, etc2. 1. Typical Data Processing Chain Astro-WISE was originally designed to handle the large datasets from the OmegaCAM instrument such as the KiDS survey (Verdoes Kleijn et al. 2012). The backbone of Astro-WISE is set by the way it captures all science products obtained in survey operations in an object-oriented data model. Figure 1 shows the main astronomical classes in the Astro-WISE environment, the basic elements of the data processing chain. Each block is a class and each instance of a class is called a Target. The class incorporates a method to derive the data of the Target from other objects, called its dependencies. The user has an ability to combine recipes in a pipeline to process the data by directly requesting the final required data product he or she is interested in. All processing parameters, along with the full data lineage, are saved in the metadata through the persistence of all objects. In the demo the user goes from a RawScienceFrame (raw frame observed by the VST and ingested in Astro-WISE) to a SourceList (the cata1http://www.astro-wise.org 2http://www.astro-wise.org/portal/instruments_index.shtml