Version 6 of the ESO Science Data Products standard is now published. It is a complete revision and restructuring of the previously published version available on the ESO Phase 3 web site. It now integrates the information published as separate addenda and in the Phase 3 frequently asked questions also. A major effort has been devoted to improve the readability and clarity of the text. Errors and typos have been corrected. The new version of the standard can be downloaded as PDF document.

The Science Data Products standard specifies the structure and data format that reduced data products must comply with for successful completion of Phase 3 and integration into the ESO archive. The target audience consists of 1) principal investigators and their collaborators who return reduced data products resulting from ESO/non-ESO observations for public release to the astronomical community through the ESO archive, 2) ESO scientists involved in the QC process or in specific reprocessing projects, 3) instruments scientists and pipeline developers for the new and existing ESO instruments, 4) archive users who need to understand the structure and format of the science data products they intend to use for their own science.

The corresponding on-line data verification service to check the compliance of format and provenance with respect to the SDP standard has been updated to version 6. How to access this service from the Release Manager is documented in the Phase 3 instructions. A detailed summary of the implemented checks is available here.

This data release (DR5.1) is based on the observations acquired between February 2010 and October 2016 of 42 VMC survey tiles encompassing the whole Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC), the Magellanic Bridge and the Magellanic Stream components of the survey. The total sky coverage is ~40 deg²  in the SMC, ~ 20 deg²  in the Bridge and ~3 deg²  in the Stream. This release adds reduced and calibrated deep products (co-added tile images and related single band catalogues), together with a multi-band (YJKs) aperture matched, epoch merged source catalogue for more than 14.6 million sources, three multi epoch single band catalogues, a catalogue of variable sources (39406 records) and a PSF photometry catalogue. The total volume of this data release is about 166 Gb.

The data published within the VMC DR5.1 release are produced by the Wide Field Astronomy Unit (WFAU).

The KiDS DR4.1 catalogue is an update of the DR4.0 catalogue which, due to a small bug in the alignment of the mask images during the multi-band catalogue production, has incorrect photometry flags for a small percentage of sources on 196 tiles. Those 196 updated tiles have been provided as KiDS DR4.1.

The ESO Archive Science Portal allows browsing and exploration of archive content using an intuitive interactive user interface that supports iterative queries or by direct database and Virtual Observatory (VO) access using user scripts and VO-aware tools. The latest version, released on 23 April 2020, provides the features and improvements listed below.

During the commissioning runs of MATISSE at VLTI in the second half of 2018 several astronomical targets were observed, in order to assess the scientific capabilities of the instrument and to optimise the observing strategies. This page provides links to selected data obtained during those runs, for both science and calibration targets.

The MUSE Analysis of Gas around Galaxies project (MAGG, ESO programme ID: 197.A-0384, PI: M. Fumagalli) provides the community with high quality VLT/MUSE cubes centered on bright redshift z~3.5 quasars (Lofthouse et al. 2019). These absorbers were discovered in archival high-to-medium resolution spectra of the quasars collected, among others, with UVES and XSHOOTER.

The VISTA Hemisphere Survey (VHS, ESO Programme ID: 79.A-2010, PI R. McMahon) is a wide area - multi band - near infrared survey, which when combined with other VISTA public surveys, will result in the coverage of the whole southern celestial hemisphere (Declination < 0; 20,000 deg²), to a depth 30 times fainter than 2MASS/DENIS in at least two filters (J and Ks), with a minimum exposure time of 60 seconds per filter and a median 5*sigma point source depth of AB = 20.8 and 20.0 in J and Ks filters respectively.

The VISTA Kilo-degree Infrared Galaxy Public Survey (VIKING) is a wide area (covering a final area of 1350 sq. deg.), intermediate-depth (5-sigma detection limit J~21 on Vega system) near-infrared imaging survey, in the five broadband filters Z, Y, J, H, Ks. The sky coverage has maximum overlap with the Kilo-Degree Survey KiDS in the optical bands.

The VISTA EXtension to Auxiliary Surveys (VEXAS, 'Spiniello & Agnello, 2019, A&A, 630') project aims at providing photometric catalogues with the most uniform spatial coverage, in the multi-wavelength sky for various scientific uses, for example object classification (e.g. quasars, galaxies, and stars; high-z galaxies, white dwarfs), photometric redshifts of large galaxy samples and identification of exotic objects (e.g. extremely red objects and lensed quasars).

The ADHOC programme (096.C-0730(A) and 097.C-0749(A), PI G. Beccari) is equivalent to an OmegaCAM mini-survey targeting circumstellar discs in nearby Galactic star-forming regions. The scientific goal of this mini-survey is the study of the star formation history of several star-forming regions using deep, wide field, multi-band observations in the optical filters u, g, r, i and Hα, with depth reaching 21 AB mag in r. A total of eight star-forming regions in the Galaxy were observed.