The European Interferometry Initiative (EII) is announcing that registrations are now open for the 11th VLTI School, funded by the Opticon/Radionet Pilot programme, with support from ESO.

The number of participants is limited to a maximum of 50. There is no registration fee. Limited funding will be available for accommodation and travel.

Applications for funding before March 1, 2023, will receive full consideration pending on merit and available budget.

The Fornax3D survey is an integral field spectroscopic survey of the Fornax cluster of galaxies. This new data release contains mosaiced IFS MUSE cubes with their white lamp images for the 31 galaxies brighter than m_B=15 within the virial radius of the cluster. The total data volume is 121.5 Gb. The survey was conducted under the ESO programme 296.B-5054(A), PI M. Sarzi and E. Iodice, with MUSE at the ESO VLT in wide-field mode. This instrument configuration ensures a spatial sampling of 0.2×0.2 arcsec², a wavelength coverage from 4650 to 9300 Å with a spectral sampling of 1.25 Å/pixel, and a nominal spectral resolution of FWHM = 2.5 Å at 7000 Å. The main science goals of the survey are to understand the assembly history of the Fornax cluster and of the early-type galaxies, study the formation of substructures in galaxies and the properties of globular cluster and planetary nebulae population. For more information on the background and goals, please consult the latest paper by Sarzi, Iodice et al. in The Messenger.

Shortly after the publication of the Call for Proposal for ESO Period 112, we would like to offer a short session to present the material you will need to write a proposal for the La Silla Paranal Observatory. This session will take place online Friday 3 March 2023 at 12 CET, using the MS Teams platform.

This 1.5-hour session will provide an overview of the available material on our website as well as cover the following topics:

• News and changes in P112
• VLT-ALMA joint proposals from the VLT and from the ALMA perspective
• New instruments: ERIS and NIRPS
• Distributed Peer Review (DPR) and Phase 1 tools updates.

The ESO Telescope Bibliography (telbib) is a database of refereed papers that uses data from ESO’s observing facilities. Telbib is used to compute the Basic ESO Publication Statistics (PubStats), now available on a dedicated webpage. 

Publication statistics are available for ESO in general, and for the VLT, VLTI, and Survey telescopes, La Silla facilities, APEX, and ALMA. The use of archival data in ESO data papers is dealt with in a dedicated section. Further information is provided about the Top 20 data papers as well as a comparison with the output from other major observatories. 

The latest edition of ESO’s science and technology journal, The Messenger, is now available online. Issue 189 features a summary of the science results of the ALMA large programme ATOMIUM, describing how ALMA has been used to trace the origins of molecules in dust forming oxygen-rich M-type stars. Summary of the science results and upcoming data release of the Fornax3D project, which is a magnitude-limited study of galaxies in the Fornax Cluster with VLT/MUSE, can also be found.