Detector quality control

Cerro Tololo Interamerican Observatory (CTIO) and the Southern Astrophysical Research Telescope (SOAR) are home to several telescopes, ranging from 4.2 to 0.9 meters in diameter. Every telescope has one or more working instruments, which are used every night of the year; keeping this vast amount of instruments (which includes a very big multi-ccd focal plane as well as visible and near infrared imagers and spectrographs) functioning in a way that ensures an appropriate science quality on each one of them is not a minor challenge. In order to help with this task we have developed an observatory-wide Detector and Instrument Quality Control system, which consist on a set of centralized tools: real time telemetry for all the instruments, automatic detector quality performance assessment, electronic logbooks, instrument software logging, image visualization, etc. All the data goes to databases and is available via web browsers.