The full release of the EIS-wide data, except for the U-band observations of patch B, is scheduled for July 1998. At that time, in addition to the calibrated frames and single-frame catalogs the coadded images and associated weight and context maps and catalogs will become available. Information relative to the contexts, which for coadded images replace the concept of a frame and is critical for the suitable characterization of the data for analysis purposes as was done in this paper on a frame basis. Only with the context maps it will be possible to extract sub-catalogs covering areas which fulfill particular requirements of homogeneity.
In parallel, the EIS pipeline will be revised and upgraded to handle data from CCD mosaics (SUSI2 and WFI@2.2), a key element for EIS-deep and the Pilot Survey envisioned for the the first three months of operation of the ESO/MPIA 2.2 m telescope. One of the goals of the latter is to complete EIS-wide by providing multicolor coverage of some of the EIS patches already observed in the I-band. Another important task is to improve the data rate of the pipeline which will be essential to cope with the expected data flow from the 2.2 m telescope.
Complementing the EIS pipeline, software has also been implemented to produce derived catalogs which will also be made public. Priority has been given to searches of clusters of galaxies and preliminary results based on the single frames of patch A will be reported in separate papers of this series (Olsen et al. 1999).
All software and associated documentation will also be made available together with an in-depth discussion of the algorithms used in the pipeline (Deul et al. 1999). For the time being the upgraded SExtractor can be found in the EIS home page.
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