Presentation of AMBER/VLTI Data Reduction

This course describes the data reduction process of the AMBER instrument, the three-beam recombiner of the Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI). We develop its principles from a theoretical point of view, and we illustrate the main points with examples taken from AMBER real observations. We particularly emphasize that the AMBER data reduction process is (i) a fit of the interferogram in the detector plane, (ii) using an a priori calibration of the instrument, where (iii) the complex visibility of the source is estimated from a least-square determination of a linear inverse problem, and where (iv) the derived AMBER observables are the squared visibility, the closure phase, and the spectral differential phase.