SCUBA

SCUBA is the project I started at the Very Large Telescope. When proposing their projects to the observatory, astronomers specify the conditions in which they have to be observed and what data quality they need to carry on with their science project. SCUBA has been made to check that it is indeed the case.

Each night, hundreds of Gb of data are created at the observatory by all the astronomical instruments and there data are all different. They can be simple images of regions of sky (like with FORS2 imaging mode), data cube (like with MUSE or KMOS), spectra (Xshooter, or the now retired VIMOS). Each of the instruments are very specific and so are the data they produce.

To makes these checks, SCUBA looks at each single piece of data taken at each instrument and tell the observer/telescope operator if this is compliant with the requirements. This is done with a rgeat deal of automation and data visualisation but ultimately the control room staff has the last word. We started the implementation in the UT2 telescope and then it spreaded all over the observtory.

While I am not working at the VLT anymore, I know that SCUBA is still actively developed (and I am quite proud of it!). SCUBA was presented and published at the SPIE conference (Thomas et al., 2020).

As an observatory tool, SCUBA is unfortunately not open source.