Announcements

28 June 2013: Cycle 1 Early Science observing resumed at nominal priority in June 2013 after development work on the array and infrastructure. To ensure sufficient time to complete many Cycle 1 high priority programmes, Cycle 1 has been extended until the end of May 2014 and Cycle 1 DDT proposals will be accepted until that date. The call for Cycle 2 Early Science proposals will appear in October 2013 with a deadline for proposal submission in December 2013. Cycle 2 Early Science observations are expected to start in June 2014. Full details here. The final report on ALMA Cycle 0 observations has been published and is available as PDF.

28 June 2013: ERIS, the Enhanced Resolution Imager and Spectrograph, is a 1-5 µm instrument for the Cassegrain focus of UT4 at the VLT. It will benefit from the Adaptive Optics Facility (AOF), including the deformable secondary mirror (DSM). ERIS consists of three main instrumental modules: an AO module, using the AOF DSM and one AOF laser, providing natural and laser guide star adaptive optics correction; diffraction limited imaging, sparse aperture masking and pupil plane coronagraphy capabilities from 1-5 µm with a 2k x 2k NIR detector; a refurbished version of the SPIFFI spectrograph, the 1-2.5 µm integral field unit currently in SINFONI, slightly modified for ERIS. ERIS is in the preliminary design phase and is due for installation on the VLT in 2017; an announcement has been issued. More details about ERIS can be found here. A full listing of the instrumentation development and upgrade projects is available here.

28 June 2013: The ESO Annual Report for 2012 has been approved by the ESO Council and issued. The report carries news of research highlights and technical developments, summaries of the work of all the ESO Departments, digests of Committee meetings, and much more. The Annual Report is available in PDF from here.

23 May 2013: The research studentship programme provides an outstanding opportunity for Ph.D. students to experience the exciting scientific environment, at one of the world's leading observatories, for a period of up to two years. ESO's studentship positions are open to students enrolled in a university Ph.D. programme in astronomy or related fields. Students accepted into the programme work on their doctoral project under the formal supervision of their home university but, for a period of between one and two years, they come to ESO to work and study under the co-supervision of an ESO staff astronomer. Studentships may be hosted either at ESO Headquarters in Garching (Germany) or at ESO Offices in Santiago (Chile), where two positions per year are provided for students enrolled in South American universities. An article with more details about this scheme can be found in West et al. 2009. The studentship selection takes place on an annual ...

23 May 2013: A new version of ESO's pipeline reduction environment (Reflex 2.4) was made available on 6 May 2013. Reflex allows easy and intuitive execution of reduction pipelines, including interactive inspection of intermediate results and tuning of pipeline parameters. The new version includes improvements to the interactive GUIs, bug fixes, and significant improvements to some of the supported pipelines. Currently, Reflex workflows are available for: UVES point source echelle data and FLAMES-UVES; FORS2 LSS/MOS/MXU modes; VIMOS MOS and IFU; X-shooter slit data. In addition, there is a template workflow which can aid users in creating their own workflows. Workflows for additional instruments will be added later this year. Reflex and supported reduction pipelines can be installed with the installation script and tutorials can be downloaded.

23 May 2013: A revised version of the Phase 3 policies has been published, and this now includes specific information on VST, spectroscopic surveys and catalogue information, and VISTA public survey policies. The list of frequently asked questions has also been updated. The configuration of the Phase 3 validator has been updated and is now ready to be used for the verification of 1D spectra and generic images. No user action is necessary in order to activate the new configuration: the next time the Java validator code is launched, the updated configuration will be taken into account automatically.

23 May 2013: A new email address for all questions related to the ESO use of the APEX telescope has been set up: apex-help@eso.org. All questions regarding APEX Phases 1 and 2 and the content of data deliveries should be directed to this new address. Technical questions regarding the downloading of APEX data from the ESO archive should be directed to archive@eso.org.

23 May 2013: The last 7-metre antenna forming the Atacama Compact Array (ACA) has been delivered to the ALMA high site. The ACA is a subset of 16 closely separated antennas, four 12-metre and twelve 7-metre antennas, produced in and delivered by Japan. The ACA is crucial for filling in the short spacings in the uv-plane coverage of ALMA and for total power measurements. The ACA has been named the Morita Array after Professor Koh-ichiro Morita, who died in 2012 and was closely associated with the development of ALMA. Read more.

23 May 2013: Portugal confirmed that it will join the list of participants in the European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT) programme. Thirteen ESO Member States have now confirmed their full participation in the project. More details.

17 April 2013: The KMOS near-infrared multi-object integral field spectrometer underwent commissioning runs in November/December 2012 and in January and March 2013. It is being prepared for service and visitor mode observations in Period 92 (October 2013–March 2014). A brief description of first light and commissioning can be found here, and some of the commissioning raw data can be accessed, although no reduction pipeline is yet available. Science Verification (SV) of KMOS will take place in June 2013 and full details will be announced here. The SV programme aims to demonstrate the scientific potential of new instruments within the La Silla Paranal Observatory, develop the observing and reduction tools and foster early scientific return. SV observations must not overlap with programmes already submitted. Successful applicants of SV proposals are required to reduce and publish their data in a timely manner. See the SV Policy and Procedures for more details.

17 April 2013: The application deadline for Period 92 (October 2013–March 2014) closed on 27 March and a total of 892 proposals were received. There were 869 proposals for Normal Programmes, 21 for Large Programmes and two for Calibration Programmes. Of the proposals for Large Programmes, nine were for Paranal, eight were for La Silla telescopes and five were for APEX. There were nine proposals in the new category of Monitoring Programme (as defined in the Call for Proposals), and 40 target of opportunity programmes were submitted. The percentage of submitted programmes by OPC science category was: A Cosmology: 21.7% B Galaxies and Galactic Nuclei: 16.6% C Interstellar Medium, Star Formation and Planetary Systems: 32.9% D Stellar Evolution: 28.8% The OPC meets on 23–26 May 2013 and proposers will be informed of the outcome of their proposals around the end of June.

17 April 2013: MIDI has recently been commissioned with the PRIMA Fringe Sensor Unit FSU-A as an external fringe tracker, enabling improved sensitivities. This mode has been offered from Period 91 for use with the Auxiliary Telescopes (ATs) in Visitor Mode. PRIMA+FSU-A enables increased visibilities, for feeble disc emission from young stars for example, with factors 5–10 times in sensitivity improvement (down to 50 mJy limit) over classical MIDI stand-alone operation modes. A new VLTI instrument is under construction: MATISSE is a mid-infrared spectro-interferometer combining the beams of up to four UTs/ATs of VLTI. MATISSE has recently passed its Final Design Review and construction has already begun. Preliminary acceptance is planned for mid 2017. An early description of the instrument can be found here. The VLTI GRAVITY instrument is a four-way, K-band, beam combiner. Its main operational mode makes use of all four 8-metre VLT Unit Telescopes to measure astrometric separations of objects located within the 2-arcsecond field ...

17 April 2013: Representatives of the United Kingdom and Denmark have confirmed that their countries will participate in the European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT) programme. Twelve ESO Member States have now joined the E-ELT programme. Construction of the E-ELT is expected to start later in 2013, with first light to come early in the next decade.

17 April 2013: A succinct description of the ESO end-to-end science operations process, Operating the Very Large Telescope, has recently been released. The six-page PDF summarises observing time allocation, observations, data taking and archiving. More details.

17 April 2013: The European Astronomical Society has awarded the 2013 Tycho Brahe Prize to Massimo Tarenghi, in recognition of his central role in the development of ESO facilities, most notably the NTT, VLT and ALMA. More details.

17 April 2013: The fetching of data from archive requests by ftp service has been discontinued. The dataportal facility (reached after submitting a request using the "Request marked datasets" button) currently allows retrieval of data in three different ways: Instant download of the data through a Download Manager wget of the files via a downloadable shell script "Click and Save" the files one by one. Following some denial of service attacks, the media production service for large data requests is temporarily disabled. Find more details here.

1 March 2013: The Call for Proposals for observation at ESO telescopes during Period 92 (1 October 2013–31 March 2014) has been released. Note that the Call for Proposals document has undergone a substantial change in Period 92; it now focuses on listing the main news items and policies related to applying for time on ESO telescopes. The technical information about the offered instruments and facilities is contained on ESO web pages that are linked from the Call for Proposals. Important changes: A new type of programme, called a Monitoring Programme, is being offered on some VLT/I and APEX instruments, enabling proposers to monitor targets over a period of up to two years. ESO will no longer offer time on the MPG 2.2-metre telescope at La Silla. The second generation VLT instrument, KMOS is offered for the first time in Period 92. VISIR is not offered in Period 92 and X-shooter will be ...

1 March 2013: A new and more powerful laser has successfully been tested at the Paranal Observatory and formally accepted. This new laser source, called PARLA, forms a vital part of the VLT Laser Guide Star Facility (LGSF),  currently used by the adaptive optics instruments NACO and SINFONI on  UT4. PARLA will greatly improve the reliability and flexibility in operating the LGSF. It uses similar technology to that which will also be employed in the four lasers of the future Adaptive Optics Facility (AOF) currently under development. The new laser delivers up to 7 Watts of output and is very stable. This upgrade of the laser source takes advantage of a new solid-state Raman fibre laser technology currently under development at ESO, together with industrial partners, for the AOF. PARLA has already demonstrated greater reliability, which makes laser guide star adaptive optics observations possible more often. This facility will allow more programmes to ...

1 March 2013: The ALMA Observatory will accept submission of Director's Discretionary Time (DDT) proposals from 1 March 2013. In Cycle 1, a maximum of 5% of the total observation time available may be dedicated to the execution of DDT programmes. A description of proposals eligible for DDT and the applicable policies are available. ALMA DDT requests can be submitted here.

1 March 2013: On 13 March 2013 from 11:30–13:00 CLST (15:30–17:00 CET), the official inauguration of the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) will take place at the observatory’s Operations Support Facility (OSF) at the Chajnantor Plateau, in the Chilean Andes. Hundreds of guests, including the president of Chile, Sebastián Piñera, and representatives from the global scientific community, current and former ALMA personnel and its executives, as well as members of local communities, will celebrate the project. The latest results from ALMA will also be presented. A live video stream of the inauguration ceremony will be webcast from the OSF. The stream of the day’s events will run from 14:30 UT to around 16:00 UT. The live stream will be available here.