What is the “Quality Assessment” (QA)?
In order to interpret the quality of the extractions, KOA has an automated “quality assessment” (QA) grade, that uses the number of errors in fitting the object profile and the number of pixels rejected during sky fitting. The automated nature of this grading process is imperfect, so even the grade may not be correct in the archive. Grading is done order-by-order, and the large number of orders in the archive discourage manual grading of each order. The automatic QA grade is either a “P” for “pass” or “F” for “fail”. A “pass” means that reduction artifacts, while they may be present, do not obscure the underlying astronomical data. A “fail” means that no sign of the underlying data is visible in the extraction; it is dominated by reduction artifacts. Visual inspection of a random sample of HIRES orders, and comparison of the visual grades with the automated grades, indicate that the automated grading system does a good job on the “pass” grades; only 1.7% of the visually graded passes w
