SPHERE reduced data obtained by High Contrast Data Centre pipeline processing

The SPHERE instrument is a high-contrast imager and spectrograph on Unit Telescope 3 of the Very Large Telescope. It was commissioned in 2014, had its science verification in December 2014 and started regular operations in April 2015. More information can be found on the ESO SPHERE instrument dedicated pages.

This data collection contains the SPHERE science data products, which have been processed by the High Contrast Data Centre (HC-DC), previously known as SPHERE Data Centre, and released via the ESO Science Archive Facility.

The first science products - published in December 2022 - included data observed in Classical Imaging (CI), Dual-Band Imaging (DBI) from the IRDIS sub-system, observed during the ESO periods P103 and P104. In December 2025, other data acquired between April 2015 and September 2022, were added, excluding K-band and polarimetry data, which will be added at a later time.

The data were reduced by the HC-DC, an observing support service provided by the French community that targets users of the ESO instrument SPHERE. HC-DC is jointly operated by OSUG/IPAG (Grenoble), PYTHEAS/LAM/CESAM (Marseille), OCA/Lagrange (Nice), Observatoire de Paris/LESIA (Paris), and Observatoire de Lyon/CRAL. A full description of the HC-DC is available here.

HC-DC implements a data base and data reduction workflows, based on the SPHERE ESO pipeline, complemented by additional recipes to systematically process public data, which are then made available to the community. Reduced public data are made available through the HC-DC, through the DIVA+ database and, as of December 2022, through the ESO archive.