Data Quality Monitoring

WFCAM data will come with the following DQC measures that will greatly enhance the usefulness of data products for the end user if available:

• Night-time observing conditions/weather
• Instrument status values: detectors/filters/controllers OK

Individual frames will have the above information written into their headers; quick-look summit pipeline will then derive further DQC measures and insert into headers:

• sky brightness - saturated? Too bright? No signal?
• sky noise - detectors OK? Pattern noise?
• average stellar ellipticity - trailed images?
• average seeing measure
• stellar aperture correction - weird PSF?
• no. of spurious images - corrupted data?
• astrometric errors - wrong RA, Dec?
• throughput from rough photometric calibration

All processing done by the UK-side pipeline will record progress in image FITS headers and derive further DQC measures.