Announcements

24 October 2013: ESO has recently expanded and improved the user experience in obtaining information about, and data from, Service and Visitor Mode runs on the Run Progress Pages. These pages, available via the User Portal link View your list of Observing Runs, now provide links for accessing all data from a run, data from one or more single OBs from a run, or even data from a single execution of a single OB. In addition, there is increased flexibility in how the user can specify the scope and content of pdf-formatted night logs on the Paranal Night Reports page. Full details are available by clicking on the Run Progress Legend tab on the Run Progress pages.

24 October 2013: The Science Archive Facility now provides access to reduced scientific data obtained with the UVES spectrograph mounted on the VLT. More than 75000 spectra of point-like sources obtained in "ECHELLE mode" from the beginning of 2000 until 2013 are now published. The data consist of extracted wavelength- and, whenever possible, flux-calibrated 1-dimensional spectra in tabular format following the established ESO science data products standard. The UVES data collection will grow with time and include the current stream of UVES data as they are acquired at the observatory, with the reduced products becoming available in monthly release cycles as soon as they are processed. Data obtained using the image slicer is planned to be added to the collection later. Following UVES, it is planned to support further instruments and observation modes in a similar way based on an evaluation of the quality and legacy value of the respective data products. According ...

24 October 2013: If you wish to conduct a PhD in astronomy-astrophysics within one of the largest centres of astrophysical research in the world, which covers every subject from planets, stars, and galaxies to cosmology, you should seriously consider applying to the IMPRS studentship programme in Munich. The International Max-Planck Research School on Astrophysics is a joint graduate school of the Max-Planck Institutes for extraterrestrial Physics (MPE) and Astrophysics (MPA), the Observatory of the Ludwig-Maximilians University (LMU), and ESO. It has its centre on the Garching research campus and offers a number of full 3-year positions to conduct exciting research in one of the involved institutes. ESO, as one active partner of the IMPRS programme, will this round offer from 2 to 3 positions, under the supervision of a member of the Faculty at ESO Headquarters. Applicants for IMPRS studentships should hold a Bachelor or Masters Degree or Diploma in Physics or Astronomy ...

24 October 2013: The VIMOS Public Extragalactic Redshift Survey (VIPERS) is an ongoing Large Programme to map in detail the large-scale distribution of galaxies at 0.5<z<1.2. The project is focused on precisely measuring galaxy clustering and related cosmological quantities, while providing a detailed description of galaxy properties and evolutionary trends, when the Universe was about half its current age. The survey includes a broad legacy for the community, with fairly fast release of the measured redshifts. The first series of scientific results appeared earlier this year (see the overview in The Messenger Guzzo et al. 2013) and Public Data Release 1 (PDR-1) contains the first 57000 redshifts used to produce these analyses. The data correspond to nearly 2/3 of the VIPERS final expected yield and include: a spectroscopic catalogue (IAB<22.5); CFHTLS parent photometric catalogue (five band photometry to IAB=24.0, plus other information); photometric and survey masks, including target sampling rate and redshift measurement ...

3 September 2013: The Call for Proposals for observations at ESO telescopes during Period 93 (1 April–30 September 2014) has been released. Please consult CfP 93 document for the main news and policies related to applying for time on ESO telescopes. All technical information about the offered instruments and facilities is contained on ESO web pages that are linked from the Call for Proposals. NACO is offered on UT4 (pending successful instrument move between Nasmyth foci) in Period 93. HAWK-I will be temporarily removed from UT4, until it is needed for AOF -related activities, and is therefore not offered in Period 93. ISAAC is being decommissioned during Period 92 in order to allow for the installation of the second-generation instrument, SPHERE. The following PI instruments are offered on APEX in Period 93: CHAMP+ (620–720 and 780–900 GHz) and FLASH (345 GHz and 460 GHz). ESO reserves the right to allocate time in Delegated ...

3 September 2013: ESO has a prominent fellowship programme in both Garching (Germany) and Santiago (Chile), with a yearly application deadline. The goal of these fellowships is to offer outstanding early-career scientists the opportunity to further develop their independent research programmes in an exciting scientific environment with close contact to the activities and staff at ESO. The closing date for applications to begin in 2014 is 15 October 2013. Review of the application documents, including the recommendation letters, will begin immediately after the closing date. Incomplete or late applications will not be considered. Full details can be found here. Applications should be made online through the ESO recruitment portal. Separate application forms must be completed for Garching and Santiago fellowships.

3 September 2013: The Science Archive Facility now provides community access to the first data products from the VST public survey projects. Following a year and a half of successful scientific operations, the VST public surveys have returned nearly 1.5 TB of reduced data products, which can be queried for and downloaded via dedicated query interfaces. A summary of the scientific goals and observing strategies of all the Public Surveys is available. Data is available for the following Public Surveys: KiDs - The Kilo-Degree SurveyKiDS will survey two areas of extragalactic sky, each 750 square degrees each, in four filters (u',g',r' and i') to 24-25 mag. depending on filter. In parallel, the companion VIKING Public Survey on the VISTA telescope will cover the same area in five near-infrared bands: Z,Y,J,H and K. VPHAS+The VST Photometric Hα Survey of the Southern Galactic PlaneVPHAS+ will combine Hα and broadband u',g',r' and i' imaging over an ...

3 September 2013: In a collaboration between the Observatoire de la Côte d'Azur (OCA, Nice) and ESO, stellar radial velocities, and atmospheric parameters, including effective temperature, surface gravity, mean metallicity and enrichment in alpha-elements, have been obtained by analyzing 21551 FEROS spectra from the Science Archive Facility with the MATISSE parameterisation algorithm. A dedicated web interface allows these data to be browsed, searched and downloaded. Associated data documentation can be consulted for more details.

3 September 2013: The science results coming from ESO's facilities are not just of interest to the astronomical community, but also to the public at large. ESO's education and Public Outreach Department (ePOD) is always pleased to hear about new results that might make ESO science press releases. Such releases not only give your results wider coverage — often in national newspapers and broadcast media all around the world — but also raise public awareness of ESO itself and its achievements. ePOD can help with preparing an engaging text as well as impressive visuals, images and videos, to enhance the impact. Of particular interest are results that are surprises, new discoveries or major advances. If you think you have such a result please contact us (rhook@eso.org) as soon as possible, ideally around the time that the paper is submitted so we have plenty of time to assess the result and prepare a release. ...

2 September 2013: A new version of ACE, the Access Control at ESO, has been released. This tool enables successful ESO proposal PIs to delegate and share with their collaborators access to the Phase 2 observation preparation, retrieval of proprietary data from the Science Archive and delegation for the Phase 3 data products submission. The ACE tool is reached via the “Delegate” option in the User Portal. The new release enables users to view and manage the Phase 2 and Data Access Rights for active and proprietary runs from a single web page, both for the runs owned by the user (PI runs) and for the runs delegated to the user. Advice is available under Frequently Asked Questions.

19 July 2013: A call for letters of intent for VIMOS Public Spectroscopic Surveys has been issued. A public spectroscopic survey constitutes a commitment to a massive observing programme with up to 300 (visitor mode) nights devoted to answering a major scientific question. Fully reduced data must be made publicly available within a defined time period. Letters of intent for VIMOS public spectroscopic surveys should be submitted by 15 October 2013 using this template. The letters will be reviewed by the Public Spectroscopic Survey Panel and the recommended survey team(s) invited to submit observing proposals for Period 94 (deadline March 2014).

19 July 2013: The 92nd Observing Programmes Committee met on 21–24 May 2013 and recommended six new Large Programmes (two at the ESO 3.6-metre telescope, one at NTT + VLT UT1, one on VLT UT3 and two at APEX). A total of 1092 (8-hour equivalent) nights of visitor and service mode observations on VLT, VISTA and VST, the 3.6-metre, NTT and APEX have been allocated. On the VLT the balance of visitor and service in Period 92 was 26.5% and 70.7% (2.8% fillers). New and on-going Large Programmes on the VLT occupy 22% of the allocation, while the equivalent numbers on the 3.6-metre and NTT are 65% and 48% respectively. A new query form for the approved runs of Period 92, and earlier periods, is now available and enables a variety of queries by telescope, instrument, PI/CoI, title words, etc. Access to the abstracts, raw files resulting from the observations and links to ...

19 July 2013: The Period 92 Phase 2 deadline for the Service Mode observations is Thursday, 8 August 2013 at 12:00 CET. The guidelines for the preparation and submission of the observing material are available here. All P92 users preparing observations for instruments located on Paranal must use the latest version of P2PP (3.3.3) for compatibility reasons with the observation block validation scripts. This new version improves the stability of the software and brings a few new features, such as the ability of sorting and filtering observing runs in the main window.

19 July 2013: With wobbler on-off mode, the 870 micron Large Bolometer Camera (LABOCA) on APEX can obtain photometry of point sources with accurately known positions more efficiently than in the usual mapping mode. The data obtained with on-off mode can be reduced with the Bolometer Analysis (BoA) software. A new guide providing a step-by-step description of how to reduce and interpret photometry mode data (on-off observations), and assess the significance of point source detections, is now available.

19 July 2013: As of April 2013, upgrades in network, data transfer software and archive software have enabled a significant reduction in the time it takes for an APEX observation to be available to users. Over the period since October 2012 this time has been cut by more than two-thirds, and now stands at close to 48 hours, enabling PIs to provide feedback on their ongoing observations.

19 July 2013: New data products resulting from the VISTA public surveys are now available via the Phase 3 query interface from the Science Archive Facility. The current release of data from the VVV, VHS, VIKING, and VMC surveys (6.2 TB) covers mostly the period from October 2010 to September 2011 and consists of astrometrically and photometrically calibrated mosaiced and co-added images (each 1.5 square degrees), weight maps and associated single band source lists in the different bands of each survey. These new data largely complement the first VISTA public survey release from 2011, adding up to a total of 12 TB of (compressed) imaging data. Each public survey data release is accompanied by a comprehensive description. The provision of and access to VISTA public data is enabled by the collaboration of ESO with the survey PIs, the Cambridge Astronomy Survey Unit (CASU) and the Edinburgh Wide Field Astronomy Unit (WFAU). News of ...

19 July 2013: The KMOS Science Verification (SV) programme consists of 20 proposals covering topics from exoplanets to distant galaxies. The first set of SV observations (SV1) took place during 24–30 June 2013. SV observations are performed in Service Mode by a dedicated team and the resulting raw data are immediately accessible to the whole community via the Science Archive Facility. The associated calibrations needed to process the data can be obtained via CalSelector during the archive query. The 2nd SV period (SV2) is scheduled to take place over 21–27 September 2013.

19 July 2013: Staff vacancies for the senior position of Director for Science, based in Garching, and for an operations astronomer at Paranal to support VLTI have been opened. The deadlines are 8 September and 31 August 2013, respectively. ESO Fellowships are also open for application with a deadline of 15 October 2013. Full details can be found on the ESO Recruitment Portal.

28 June 2013: On account of the activities related to the installation of MUSE, NACO will be dismounted from the Nasmyth platform of UT4 and unavailable from 2 September 2013.  At the time of releasing the Call for Proposals the exact timeline of MUSE arrival was not finalised and it was anticipated that NACO would be removed during Period 92. The MUSE Consortium and ESO Instrumentation have now confirmed that the installation and commissioning activities will start towards the end of January 2014. To allow the required modifications of the Nasmyth platform of UT4, NACO will be disconnected at the end of Period 91 and it will therefore be unavailable for the whole duration of Period 92. The instrument will be stored for future re-use.

28 June 2013: In order to provide sufficient time for the preparation of the arrival of SPHERE at UT3, the activities to decommission ISAAC  will start on 10 December 2013. As of that date the instrument will no longer be available for science operations.