ESO is happy to announce the next La Silla Observing School, which will be held in February 2025 at the ESO premises in Santiago de Chile and at the La Silla Observatory.  

The newly offered possibility of proposing joint observations using both the VLT and ALMA has demonstrated the unique synergies made possible by closely coordinated observations by those two facilities. By obtaining multiple epochs of nearly-contemporary observations of a protoplanetary disk with the VLT instrument SPHERE and with ALMA, respectively tracing the surface and the midplane layers of the disk, an international team is aiming at understanding how fast the disk can cool under the shadows and derive the cooling timescale, a critical parameter of disk evolution models (prog ID 113.269Z, PI Benisty).

This is the third announcement of the conference “Hey GPT! Can you help me understand the Universe?”.  Please note that the deadline for abstract submission is extended to July 31st. The list of invited speakers, including the title of their talks, can be found at the conference webpage. 

This collection contains imaging data products for the observing programme CAFFEINE whose data were acquired with the ArTéMiS camera at the APEX telescope from 2018 to 2022. The 48 imaged fields cover a total area of more than ~ 2.5 deg², focused on the dense (AV > 10) parts of molecular clouds within about 3 kpc from the Sun. The released products include, per each field the 350 μm and 450 μm intensity maps with resolutions of 8'' and 10'' (half-power beam width), their related weight maps and multi-resolution H₂ column density maps. These datasets have been carefully calibrated and combined with Herschel/SPIRE data to recover large-scale emission that cannot be detected from the ground with ArTéMiS. The column density maps have been derived by including additional Herschel data at 160 μm and 250 μm and have a resolution ranging from ~8'' in their denser inner parts (AV > 40) to 18.2'' in the lower-density outer parts (AV < 40). For more details, refer to the accompanying release documentation or the publication by Mattern et al.  

With the release of the La Silla Paranal telescope schedule, the Phase 2 preparation for runs scheduled in Service Mode begins. The deadline for the submission of the Phase 2 material for Period 114 is Tuesday, 6 August 2024. The Service Mode guidelines provide detailed information about Phase 2 material preparation with the web application p2, while the instrument overview table provides quick links to user manuals, tools and p2 tutorials for individual instruments.

The 114^th Observing Programmes Committee (OPC) met during May 2024. Based on the committee's recommendations to the ESO Director General, a total of 8148 hours of (Designated) Visitor Mode and Service Mode observations were allocated on the VLT/VLTI, the 3.6-metre, and NTT telescopes. The schedule timeline and the list of scheduled runs is publicly available.

Going well beyond the 10^th anniversary of MUSE, this workshop is a very timely opportunity to reflect on the many successes and challenges such an instrument triggered and to further shape a community-wide science perspective and effort, supported by integral-field spectroscopy. Please be reminded that the deadline for the abstract submission for the MUSE24 workshop is Monday, 15^th July.

The Opticon Radionet Pilot (ORP) funding remains available till the end of 2024 for travel to one of the European ALMA Regional Centre nodes in Europe, for ALMA users who need face-to-face support for their ALMA projects. Users wishing to apply for ORP funding should fill out the form in addition to submitting a Helpdesk ticket that is required to arrange the ARC node visit. Face-to-face visits to ARC nodes can be arranged for assistance with data calibration and analysis, proposal preparation, and archive research projects.

A detailed report of the Cycle 11 Proposal Submission Statistics is now available. The report provides a summary of items such as the number of submitted proposals and time requested, subscription rates, and comparisons with the number of hours requested in previous Cycles. The report can be downloaded as a pdf document.

A new ALMA development study to automatically extract spectral line sources from ALMA data cubes and derive advanced data products from them had its kick-off meeting on 3 June 2024 in Gothenburg (Sweden). This new study, led by the Onsala Space Observatory (OSO, Chalmers University, Sweden), will start by examining how to optimize the Source Finding Application (SoFiA) software to extract emission lines from ALMA data cubes. The identified line emitting sources will then be run through the SoFiA Imaging Pipeline (SIP) to produce publication-quality advanced data products such as moment 0, 1 and 2 maps, position-velocity diagrams and extracted spectra. In the next stages, the study will investigate how to perform automated line identification, based on redshift information available in the archive. This can be used to improve the derivation of source properties in the advanced data products. The study aims to serve a broad range of science topics and to be able to be run on calibrated ALMA data cubes in the archive from previous Cycles. The ultimate goal is to enhance the scientific accessibility of spectral line data products for a wide range of scientific applications.