The Call for Proposals for observations at ESO telescopes in Period 102 (1 October 2018 – 31 March 2019) has been released. Please consult the Period 102 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 proposal submission deadline is 12:00 CEST 28 March 2018.

Starting from Period 104, Large Programmes will only be offered in even periods, i.e., periods with a proposal submission deadline in March or April. ESO encourages the community to submit Large Programmes that do not extend over a number of periods larger than that required scientifically. From Period 104 onwards, ESO will strive to execute Large Programmes over shorter periods of time (aiming at two semesters by default) while maintaining the ceiling set by Council of the observing time allocated to Large Programmes (i.e., 30% of the available time on the VLT/VLTI). These measures follow the recommendations of ESO's Time Allocation Working Group, reviewed by the Scientific Technical Committee and Users Committee, and aim to increase the scientific impact of ESO's telescopes.

Science workshops are an essential component of ESO's programmes and represent a unique opportunity to promote and foster ideas and collaborations within the scientific community. Every year, through the Directorate for Science, ESO provides support and funding to organise two workshops in Santiago and four in Garching, as well as co-funding some external workshops (see ESO Workshops calendar).

A new Call has been issued inviting community astronomers to team up with ESO staff and fellows in Chile and/or in Germany to submit proposals for ESO workshops to be held in 2019. Note that ESO has recently implemented a Code of Conduct for Workshops and Conferences, which applies to all meetings held at ESO premises. ESO-funded workshops that are held outside ESO premises are required to adopt their own codes of conduct.

The Users Committee (UC) represents ESO's astronomical community at large and acts as an advisory body to the ESO Director General on matters related to the performance, scientific access, operation and user interfaces to the La Silla Paranal Observatory and ALMA. The annual meeting of the UC is scheduled at ESO Headquarters on 26-27 April 2018. During the UC meeting updates from ESO and feedback from the user community are exchanged and openly discussed. Each year, the UC meeting has one session dedicated to a special topic – in 2018 the special topic is the future of ALMA User Support.

First Segments of ELT's Primary Mirror Successfully Cast: The first six hexagonal segments for the primary mirror of ESO's Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) have been successfully cast by SCHOTT (Germany) at their facility in Mainz. These segments will form parts of the ELT's 39-metre primary mirror, which will have 798 segments in total. After casting, the mirror segment blanks will go through a slow cooling and heat treatment sequence and will then be ground to the right shape and polished to a precision of 15 nm across the entire optical surface. The shaping and polishing will be performed by Safran Reosc (France), which will also be responsible for further testing.