On 5 June, ESO signed an agreement with an international consortium of institutions for the design and construction of ANDES, the ArmazoNes high Dispersion Echelle Spectrograph. The ANDES instrument will be installed on ESO’s Extremely Large Telescope (ELT). It will be used to search for signs of life in exoplanets and look for the very first stars, as well as to test variations of the fundamental constants of physics and measure the acceleration of the Universe’s expansion.

Following a recommendation by the ESO Scientific and Technical Committee (STC), ESO is issuing a call for letters of intent for public surveys with KMOS. A public survey is understood to be an observing programme in which the investigators commit to produce and make publicly available, within a defined time, a fully reduced and scientifically usable data set that is likely to answer a major scientific question and be of general use and of broad interest to the astronomical community. The raw data are public immediately. These surveys are envisaged to be observing programmes with up to 200 observing nights to be allocated over six semesters with KMOS.

The Call for Proposals for the La Silla Paranal Observatory will move to a yearly cycle in 2025. To address the increased duty cycle resulting from this change, a Fast Track Channel with staggered deadlines throughout the year will be introduced simultaneously. The criteria and frequency for the Fast Track Channel are under discussion with the ESO advisory committees (Scientific and Technical Committee and Users Committee). The community will be informed regularly about the implementation of the yearly call and the Fast Track Channel through news in the upcoming Call for Proposals for Period 115, newsletter posts and direct emails to active Principal Investigators. The change follows recommendations made in a report by the Time Allocation Working Group almost a decade ago.

This is the second announcement of the conference “Hey GPT! Can you help me understand the Universe? A synoptic view of the impact of chatGPT-like technologies on the future of astronomy”. The list of invited speakers, including the title of their talks, can be found at the workshop webpage.

Going well beyond the 10th 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 note that the registration and abstract submission for the ESO workshop "A decade of discoveries with MUSE and beyond" are now open.