The newly published ALMA memo 624 (https://library.nrao.edu/public/memos/alma/main/memo624.pdf) is a re-visit to ALMA site properties and the successor to the Evans 2003 site stringency work (ALMA memo 471 that used only a 300m baseline phase monitor). Importantly, the phase RMS is the main focus of the new memo, and is measured using ALMA data since Cycle 3 (over 17000 Executions blocks). Using the bright bandpass sources, the phase RMS can be measured over various timescales (30s to 240s) and at all baseline lengths observed. Scaling trends are also used to extrapolate short baseline phase RMS (from short baseline configurations) to longer baseline values as to provide a comparable sample for 'summary' baseline lengths of  500, 1000, 5000 and 10000m in all EBs.

The European ALMA Regional Centre invites European ALMA users to a virtual community assembly on April 17 at 11:00 CEST, in connection with the Cycle 10 call for proposals. At this meeting, we will provide more information on the procedures for Joint Proposals with other facilities, including the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope, the Space Telescope Science Institute's James Webb Space Telescope, and the National Radio Astronomy Observatory's Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array.

The Joint ALMA Observatory (JAO) will start Cycle 10 observations in October 2023. A Call for Proposals (CfP) with detailed information on Cycle 10 is anticipated to be issued in April 2023 and the deadline for proposal submission is anticipated to be on 10 May 2023.  The purpose of this pre-announcement is to highlight aspects of the CfP to assist with early planning.

The ALMA Cycle 10 Pre-Announcement was recently released. As a reminder, Principal Investigators who wish to submit a proposal to ALMA for Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) observations in ALMA Bands 1 or 3 made in concert with the Global mm-VLBI Array (GMVA) at 7mm and 3 mm must also submit a proposal to the GMVA by its 1 February 2023 deadline. More information can be found here.

The deadline for registering for the Meeting of ALMA Young Astronomers (MAYA 2023) is approaching fast! MAYA 2023 is a conference targeted toward early career astronomers interested in ALMA, which will take place on 6th to 10th March 2023, and it will be fully on-line. Deadline for abstract submission is 15th January 2023.

The goals of the meeting are to allow the participants to present their scientific work, interact with other participants and staff working in the ARC nodes, and potentially trigger new collaborations and new projects. For details and registration, please visit this page. 

The European ARC Network invites users to an online training on Running the Single Dish pipeline on January 27^th, 11:00 CET [Zoom link].

The ALMA observatory is pleased to announce that it has entered into Joint Proposal agreements with the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) for the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), the European Southern Observatory (ESO) for the Very Large Telescope (VLT), and the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) for the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA).

ALMA has resumed performing PI science observations following the cyber-attack. The end-to-end data acquisition and processing workflow and software were successfully re-tested prior to the restart. ALMA is currently taking observations in configuration C-3. User services are also now back online, including access to ALMA user profiles, SnooPI, and the Cycle 9 DDT submission server. As previously announced, ALMA's most compact configurations (C-1 and C-2) will not be visited again in Cycle 9.

Some Scheduling Blocks (SBs) requiring configuration C-2 were already observed in the days prior to the cyberattack. Projects with SBs in nominal configurations C-1 and C-2 that can still be observed in configuration C-3 will remain in the observing queue. As per usual ALMA policy, incomplete Cycle 9 Grade A projects will carry over into Cycle 10.