VCAL-SPHERE: Hybrid pipeline for reduction of VLT/SPHERE data

VCAL-SPHERE, for VIP-based Calibration of VLT/SPHERE data, is a versatile pipeline for high-contrast imaging of exoplanets and circumstellar disks. The pipeline covers all steps of data reduction, including raw calibration, pre-processing and post-processing (i.e., modeling and subtraction of the stellar halo), for the IFS, IRDIS-DBI and IRDIS-CI modes (and combinations thereof) of the VLT instrument SPHERE. The three main steps of the reduction correspond to different modules, where the first follows the recommended EsoRex (ascl:1504.003) workflow and associated recipes with occasional inclusion of VIP (ascl:1603.003) routines (e.g., for PCA-based sky subtraction), while the other two stages fully rely on the VIP toolbox. Although the default parameters of the pipeline should yield a good reduction in most cases, these can be tuned using JSON parameter files for each stage of the pipeline for optimal reduction of specific datasets.