FLIPS is an autonomous software package developed at CFHT by Jean-Charles Cuillandre for reducing at high speed the large amount of data produced by CCD mosaics (FLIPS also works for single output detectors). It was initially developed for early CCD mosaic wide-field imagers at CFHT: MOCAM (4Kx4K pixels) and UH8K (8Kx8K pixels). It will be a complementary element of the data produced by the new imager for the CFHT prime focus: the CFH12K, a mosaic of 12 2Kx4K thinned CCDs (the mosaic size is 12Kx8K pixels) to help observers coping with the deluge of data with well established recipes for the instrument.

FLIPS is not a data analysis package like IRAF, MIDAS or IDL: FLIPS' end product are images ready to be analyzed with such packages. FLIPS is similar to the IRAF package MSCRED.

FLIPS is foreseen as the pre-reduction module for TERAPIX (Traitement Elementaire Reduction et Analyse des PIXels de MEGACAM), a data center for the MEGACAM data processing, a 18Kx18K pixels CCD mosaic camera for the new prime focus of CFHT (MEGAPRIME project). FLIPS would be used at the TERAPIX center (IAP, Paris) as well as at the telescope during observations to reduce a certain type of data on the run. The goal is to get MEGACAM data corrected from the instrumental signature when they leave CFHT to TERAPIX (or to the observer): offset (bias, dark) and gain (flat-field) [no re-sampling, this will be done by TERAPIX].

The present document will give you extensive informations on FLIPS (as per summer 1998) and how to use it. There is not yet a formal release of the software so the package can't be distributed but this will happen in the near future (summer 1999).

Current developments as per June 1999 are implementation of the 32 bits mode support, Multi-Extension FITS format (MEF) support and fully integrated packages to go directly from raw data to a single final image without any temporary files (e.g. flat-fields combine with automatic offset correction and rescaling), etc...