Chapter 2. The products in an observation

Table of Contents

2.1. Overview
2.2. Navigating an ObservationContext
2.2.1. In HIPE
2.2.2. On disc
2.3. Spectroscopy
2.3.1. Slicing in the pipeline
2.3.2. Level 0 to 1
2.3.3. Level 2 and higher
2.3.4. Missing products
2.3.5. Spectroscopy FITS files on disc
2.3.6. Unchopped range scan obsids: the on- and the off-source obsid
2.4. Photometry
2.4.1. Photometry FITS files on disc
2.5. Tips for reading the Quality and History information

2.1. Overview

The ObservationContext is a container of the entirety of data for any Herschel observation. This includes: the raw and the SPG-processed scientific data, the calibration files used in the SPG processing, the processing history, quality information, satellite and instrument data, pointing data, and a lot of Meta data. These data are held on disc as a collection of FITS files with a directory structure that HIPE can translate, and when you view the ObservationContext in HIPE you can browse through its contents using the Observation Viewer.

In this chapter the layout of an ObservationContext on disc and as viewed in HIPE is explained, first in general and then for spectroscopy and photometry separately. In the next chapters are details about the datasets and the meta data of the products introduced here.