The Call for Proposals for observations at ESO telescopes in Period 96 (1 October 2015 – 31 March 2016) has been released. Please consult the Call for Proposals document for the main news items and policies related to applying for time on ESO telescopes. All technical information about the offered instruments and facilities is contained on ESO webpages that are linked from the Call.
The deadline for proposals is 12:00 CET 26 March 2015.

The ESO 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. Studentship positions are open to students enrolled in a university Ph.D. programme in astronomy or related fields and work under the formal supervision of their home university but, for a period of between one and two years, they study at ESO under the co-supervision of an ESO staff astronomer.
The deadline for ESO Studentship applications has been moved to 01 May. Details will be provided in March.

The Swedish-ESO PI receiver for APEX (SEPIA) is a new instrument that is currently being commissioned. It will initially host an ALMA Band 5 receiver covering 159 to 211 GHz in dual-polarization, sideband-separating bands of 4 GHz width. SEPIA is offered for regular proposals in Period 96 (see the Call for Proposals), but ESO also invites the community to submit short Science Verification proposals with a deadline of 18 March 2015. Please find further details here.

The User Support Department (USD) invites principal investigators and their Phase 2 delegates to participate in the most recent user feedback campaign. The survey is designed to provide USD with the opinions of the science community on a number of services. As such it is an important way for the department to know where we are doing well, and where there is room for improvement.

The FLAMES GIRAFFE spectrograph is not kept at a controlled temperature, and thus, at the beginning of every observing block, GIRAFFE is re-focussed to take account of collimator temperature. The best focus position depends on temperature, grating and wavelength setting. The FLAMES Instrument Operation Team discovered that the software coefficients used to set the focus of GIRAFFE have changed since commissioning – presumably because of aging effects in the optics – and have measured and updated these coefficients. The updated values lead to a substantial increase in spectral resolution and sensitivity across all settings, particularly for the high resolution (HR) settings.