The $\textit{Gaia}$-ESO Survey: Calibration strategy

Based on data products from observations made with ESO Telescopes at the La Silla Paranal Observatory under program ID 188.B-3002 and 193.B-0936. These data products have been processed by the Cambridge Astronomy Survey Unit (CASU) at the Institute of Astronomy, University of Cambridge, and by the FLAMES/UVES reduction team at INAF–Osservatorio Astrofisico di Arcetri. These data have been obtained from the Gaia-ESO Survey Data Archive, prepared and hosted by the Wide Field Astronomy Unit, Institute for Astronomy, University of Edinburgh, which is funded by the UK Science and Technology Facilities Council. This work was partly supported by the European Union FP7 program through ERC grant number 320360 and by the Leverhulme Trust through grant RPG-2012-541. We acknowledge the support from INAF and Ministero dell’Istruzione, dell’Universita e della Ricerca (MIUR) in the form of the grant “Premiale VLT 2012”. The results presented here benefit from discussions held during the Gaia-ESO workshops and conferences supported by the ESF (European Science Foundation) through the GREAT Research Network Programme. S.F. and T.B. acknowledge the support from the New Milky Way project funded by a grant from the Knut and Alice Wallenberg foundation. C.L. gratefully acknowledges financial support from the European Research Council (ERC-CoG-646928, Multi-Pop, PI: N. Bastian). U.H. and A.J.K acknowledge support from the Swedish National Space Board (Rymdstyrelsen). The research of A.L. has been subsidized by the Belgian Federal Science Policy Office under contract No. BR/143/A2/BRASS. R.S. acknowledges support by the National Science Center of Poland through grant 2014/15/B/ST9/03981. C.A.P. is thankful for support from the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (MINECO) through grant AYA2014- 56359-P. J.M. acknowledges support from the ERC Consolidator Grant funding scheme (project STARKEY, G.A. No. 615604). T.M. acknowledges financial support from Belspo for contract PRODEX Gaia-DPAC. S.G.S acknowledges the support by Fundacao para a Ciencia e Tecnologia (FCT) through national funds and a research grant (project ref. UID/FIS/04434/2013, and PTDC/FISAST/7073/2014). S.G.S. also acknowledge the support from FCT through Investigador FCT contract of reference IF/00028/2014 and POPH/FSE (EC) by FEDER funding through the program “Programa Operacional de Factores de Competitividade – COMPETE”. L.S. acknowledges support by the Ministry of Economy, Development, and Tourism’s Millennium Science Initiative through grant IC120009, awarded to The Millennium Institute of Astrophysics (MAS). M.Z. acknowledges support by the Ministry of Economy, Development, and Tourism’s Millennium Science Initiative through grant IC120009, awarded to The Millennium Institute of Astrophysics (MAS), by Fondecyt Regular 1150345 and by the BASAL CATA PFB-06. E.J.A. and M.T.C acknowledge the financial support from the Spanish Ministerio de Economia y Competitividad, through grant AYA2013-40611-P. S.Z. acknowledge the support from the INAF grant “PRIN INAF 2014”, “Star won’t tell their ages to Gaia, Galactic Archaelogy with wide-area asterosismic”. This research has made use of the WEBDA database, operated at the Department of Theoretical Physics and Astrophysics of the Masaryk University; of the TOPCAT catalogue handling and plotting tool (Taylor 2005); of the Simbad database and the VizieR catalog access tool, CDS, Strasbourg, France (Ochsenbein et al. 2000); and of NASA’s Astrophysics Data System.