Dear Fellow Communicators,

As we speak we are putting the finishing touches to three big outreach products that we have been working on intensively for some time:

• The 264-page anniversary book “Europe to the Stars — ESO's first 50 years of Exploring the Southern Sky”, a sumptuously illustrated coffee-table book taking the reader behind the scenes at the most productive ground-based observatory of the world.
• The accompanying documentary on DVD “Europe to the Stars” tells a story of cosmic curiosity, courage and perseverance. The story of discovering a Universe of deep mysteries and hidden secrets. The story of designing, building and operating the most powerful ground-based telescopes on the planet at ESO’s Chile observatories.
• The 560 page anniversary history book “The Jewel on the Mountaintop — The European Southern Observatory through Fifty Years”. As well as being a very detailed account of the history of ESO this also includes fascinating stories about the people behind the organisation.

For those of you who want to resell them at a profit we have some advantageous offers selling them at cost price.

Don’t forget that the documentary has subtitles in several languages. If yours is not available you, or someone you know, may still be able to contribute with translated subtitles. Read more at the bottom of this page, in the section on translations, for details.

Our ESO 50th anniversary events and exhibitions are starting to take off. To see if any of them happen nearby you check here and here. Please consider whether you might want to host an exhibition or an event in this special ESO year. We also plan to continue the celebrations into 2013, which is the 50th anniversary of ESO’s engagement in Chile.

Lately we’ve been busy with several exciting social media campaigns. We invited our ESO community to win free entrance tickets to Campus Party Europe, the world’s largest global technology conference and our ESA/Hubble Facebook account reached 100 000 likes. Although this is still a far cry from, for instance, Eminem (59 million likes and counting), this means we are now in the major league with our Hubble page. To celebrate our 100 000 friends who joined our Facebook page, we ran an interesting and much appreciated campaign that invited people to tag themselves in a special image and be part of a surprise Hubble mosaic picture.

And lastly, we now finally have a new series of new astronomical posters. ESO’s best vistas of the southern sky, as well as very impressive images of the world’s most advanced ground-based telescopes are waiting for you.

Let’s reach new heights in astronomy together,

Lars Lindberg Christensen (lars@eso.org)
Head, ESO education and Public Outreach Department (ePOD)

  ESO Announcements

	ESO Annual Report 2011 now available 2 July 2012: The ESO Annual Report 2011 is now available. It presents the many activities of the European Southern Observatory throughout the last year, covering topics including: Research highlights from ESO facilities, ...
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  ESOcasts

	ESOcast 45 Special: Reaching Out -- Special 50th anniversary episode #5 2 July 2012: ESOcast 45 -- Reaching Out -- is the fifth special episode of this series. In it we focus on ESO's mission of curiosity, wonder and inspiration, proclaimed through cooperation and ...
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