As part of ESO’s efforts to offer science data products to its community via the ESO science archive facility, all the spectroscopic data acquired since the beginning of UVES operations at the VLT from March 2000 to March 2020, i.e. 20 years, have been reprocessed. Whenever possible, 1D spectra have been stacked at the OB level. The master calibrations associated with the science data before March 2015 have been reprocessed for better quality and consistency. Due to this reprocessing, some of the early science products not available before are now provided. All 1D spectra products are available from the ESO archive, have quality control plots and associated 2D extracted spectral images.

A new version of the VVV VISTA Public Survey source catalog is now available from the ESO Archive. The imaging data in the ZYJHKs bands from which the source catalogue is extracted are acquired under ESO programme 179.B-2002 before the 26th of September 2015.   

This new data release includes a flux map at 870 μm for the galaxy M83 (NGC 5236). It is obtained from the combination of the observations taken with the Large APEX Bolometer Camera (LABOCA) at APEX under the ESO programme id 081.C-0827(A), PI A. Lundgren, between 2008-06-19 and 2008-06-30.

The total exposure time of the flux map is 10.5 hours, it has a signal to noise ratio of 47 in the galaxy central region, while the inner spiral arms are detected with a signal to noise ratio of more than 3. The atmospheric window of 870 μm, in which LABOCA operates, provides the opportunity to study the dust in the interstellar medium and the grain size distribution.

More information is available in the release documentation. The data can be accessed via the ESO Science Portal or programmatically.

The X-SHOOTER Spectral Library project (XSL, http://xsl.u-strasbg.fr/) aims to build a new, moderate-resolution stellar spectral library for use in stellar population modelling. Once completed the XSL will represent a significant improvement on current empirical stellar spectral libraries in terms of stellar parameters and wavelength coverage. The survey was conducted in two phases: a two-semester pilot survey (084.B-0869 and 085.B-0751) followed up by a Large Programme (189.B-0925), PI S.C Trager. The entire survey delivers spectra of a total of nearly 700 unique stars.

The joint science spectra products from the first and second XSL data releases are now available to the community via the ESO archive. The second data release (DR2) contains all the spectra obtained from the six semesters of the ESO Large Programme and consist of three segments that were observed simultaneously (UVB, VIS, NIR). If combined, the 1D spectra products cover the wavelength range between 300 nm and 2.45 μm, at a spectral resolving power close to R = 10 000. The spectra were corrected for instrument transmission and telluric absorption, and they were also corrected for wavelength-dependent flux-losses in 85% of the cases. The final spectra were corrected for radial velocity and are provided in the rest-frame (with wavelengths in air). The DR2 release supersedes the first data release (DR1) from 2014 (initially released via the XSL website only and now also available in the ESO archive as of October 2020), with a larger number of spectra (813 observations of 666 stars) and with a more extended wavelength coverage as the data from the near-infrared arm of the X-SHOOTER spectrograph are now included. The total volume of XSL DR2 is 0.7 GB. In DR1, 246 spectra of 237 unique stars were presented, which were observed during the pilot program, for a wavelength range that was restricted to the two optical arms of X-SHOOTER (300–1024 nm), for a total volume of 140 MB.

More information about the data release contents can be found in the accompanying documentation [PDF DR2, PDF DR1]. The data products are available via the science portal and programmatically [data DR2, data DR1].

The first data release of the SINFONI Survey for Unveiling the Physics and the Effect of Radiative feedback (SUPER, Circosta et al. 2018; ESO Large Programme 196.A-0377, PI: Mainieri) is now available to the community on ESO Archive via the Science Portal or programmatically.

The commissioning runs of ESPRESSO started on 27 November 2017 with the ESPRESSO first light, and ended on 26 July 2019, after three major technical missions, when discontinuities in radial velocities might be expected.

Archive users are informed that the in-house processed 1D spectra products for FEROS are now available for the months July, August, September, and October 2019. A total of 1432 new reduced 1D spectra have been added to the FEROS collection and are now downloadable from the archive science pages or programmatically. These newly processed science products complement the set of the already available ~60,000 1D spectra for FEROS. This service is now resumed following the suspension in February 2020.

The first data release of the Fornax Deep Survey with VST (FDS, Venhola et al., 2018, A&A, 620, 165) is now available on the ESO archive.

The Next Generation Transit Survey (NGTS) is a ground based exoplanet survey designed to detect Neptune and super-Earth sized planets orbiting around bright stars, using the transit method. The NGTS facility consists of 12 fully-robotic 20 cm f/2.8 telescopes located at the ESO site on Paranal, Chile. Each telescope has a 2.8x2.8 deg² field of view and is equipped with a custom filter with a bandpass of 520-890nm, which increases sensitivity to late-K and early-M stars.

This data release provides 3D data cubes obtained from KMOS, the K-band Multi-Object Spectrograph. The instrument is located at the VLT UT1 telescope and has 24 image slicer Integral Field Units (IFUs) that can be placed independently in the patrol field of 7.2 arcmin diameter. Each IFU has 14 slices with 14 spatial pixels along each slice and a field-of-view of 2.8’’x2.8’’ which gives a spatial resolution of 0.2’’. Spectral resolving power depends on the grating and is between 2000 and 4200. This initial release consists of observations from October 2013 (i.e. start of operations) until February 2020. The content of the release grows with time as new data are being acquired and processed.

Data have been reduced using the KMOS pipeline version 2.7.3 or higher. Data reduction is executed first for each IFU containing an object. It includes sky subtraction, flat fielding, wavelength calibration, flux calibration, and cube reconstruction. Telluric absorption features in the individual cube spectra are corrected. For this, an atmospheric model is fit to the closest-in-time telluric standard star measurement using the molecfit software. This model is scaled with the airmass difference between science observation and standard star measurement and applied to the extracted spectra. Flux calibration is applied using the zero-point measurement from the same standard star, without assessment of the photometric conditions. Note that all standard stars serve both as telluric and as photometric standards.

The KMOS data collection is current to March 2020, when observations were halted because of the Coronavirus-induced lockdown. It will grow again with time as observations will resume, with future processing on a roughly monthly cadence. More details about the KMOS data and their structure are available in the associated Phase 3 data release description.

The KMOS data cubes tagged "KMOS" can be queried and downloaded using the Phase 3 generic query form which provides access to all Phase 3 data, or the Phase 3 spectral data query form with query parameters suited to harvest 3D cube data. KMOS data can be browsed and accessed via the ASP web interface or programmatically.