2 LCOGT Pipeline Variants

There are two variants of the LCOGT pipeline, one of which is designed to run in real time as data comes in. Most users will only need to run the second form, known as the offline pipeline.

• The quick-look (QL) pipeline is primarily designed to perform quality-assurance analysis of the incoming data for real-time assessment of the instrument performance.
• The offline pipeline has access to all the data observed for a given night/camera and adopts a best-possible reduction approach. Images are made for each complete observation which are combined to create the final image.

2.1 Requirements for running the LCOGT pipeline

The LCOGT pipeline requires a recent Starlink installation. The latest version may be obtained from http://starlink.eao.hawaii.edu/starlink. Since development of the pipeline is an ongoing process, it is recommended that the newest builds be used to access the full capabilities of the pipeline. These builds can be obtained from
https://github.com/Starlink/ORAC-DR/ and may be kept up-to-date with git.

The Starlink Perl installation (Starperl) must be used to run the pipeline due to the module requirements. The Starlink environment should be initialized as usual before running Orac-dr.

The pipeline uses the following Starlink applications:

• Kappa
• Ccdpack
• SExtractor

2.2 Important environment variables

The pipeline uses a number of environment variables to determine where data should be read from and written to. Some are set automatically when the pipeline is initialized, but they can be overridden manually and, with the -honour flag may be left unchanged between successive runs of the pipeline. The variables that must be defined in order for the pipeline to run are denoted as ‘Mandatory’ in the list below.

• STARLINK_DIR: location of the user’s Starlink installation. [Mandatory]
• ORAC_DATA_IN: the location where data are read from. If running with -loop flag, this is the location of the flag files, rather than the data files. [Mandatory]
• ORAC_DATA_OUT: location where intermediate pipeline data products are written. [Mandatory]
• FINAL_DATA_OUT: final location for pipeline data products. At SBA, this is
  /mfs-sba/engineering/<site>/<camera>. If not defined, the current directory is assumed. [Optional]
• ORAC_DATA_CAL: a user-specified location for the library calibration files. [Mandatory]
• ORAC_CAL_ROOT: a user-specified location for pipeline configuration files. [Mandatory]
• ORAC_INSTRUMENT: the type of LCOGT instrument class in use e.g. LCOSINISTRO. [Mandatory]
• ORAC_CAMERACODE: the type of LCOGT instrument instance in use e.g. fl07. [Mandatory]
• ORAC_SITECODE: the LCOGT site code that the data is from e.g. LSC. [Mandatory]