The successful commissioning of FORS2 took place from Oct. 29 to Nov. 21, 1999 and from Jan. 24 to Feb. 8, 2000 on VLT-Kueyen. A number of astronomical targets from various object classes were observed in the different observing modes of FORS2 using all the broadband filters, some of the interference filters (used in both FORS1 and FORS2) and the grisms assigned to FORS2. For the tests of the new mask multiobject mode one science mask was made available by the VIMOS team and used for taking spectra.

The exposures were taken to assess the compliance of the instrument with the technical specifications as well as to characterize performance in the different observing modes. In addition to these more technical tasks a number of frames are certainly also useful for scientific purposes.

The total exposure time of the images and spectra from both commissioning runs totals approximately 25 hours (not counting the HIT mode images).

Nearly all data have been taken with the low gain of the detector, imaging data with 4-port readout and spectra with 1-port readout. Most of the data were taken with the standard resolution (SR) collimator, data taken in high resolution (HR) are labelled "HR" in the "mode" columnAll necessary calibration data (sky- and screen flatfileds, wavelength calibrations, bias frames) as well as a large number of standard star observations (photometric and spectroscopic) are also available. Full information for all frames is contained in the FITS headers.

If these data will be used for publications, please acknowledge that the results are based on public data released from the FORS2 Commissioning observations at the VLT Kueyen telescope.

In order to request these datasets from the Science Archive you need to be a registered archive user. If you do not yet have an ESO User Portal account, please fill out the registration form.

To request a given data set click on the object name in the leftmost column. A data set consists of all science frames obtained for a given object.