Starting this year, funding will be available again 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 MARCUs 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 reduction, proposal preparation, and archive research projects.

Announcement From UK Node

Conference: Measuring Star Formation in the Radio, Millimetre and Submillimetre: 24-26 July 2017, The University of Manchester, United Kingdom

Registration is now open.  The abstract submission deadline is 14 April 2017, and the registration deadline is 15 May 2017.  To register, please use the form at http://almaost.jb.man.ac.uk/meetings/MeasureSF/MeasuringSFmeeting.html.

The Joint ALMA Observatory (JAO) will start the next cycle of observing (Cycle 5) in October 2017. A Call for Proposals with detailed information on Cycle 5 will be issued in March 2017, with a deadline for proposal submission in April 2017. This pre-­announcement highlights aspects of the Cycle 5 proposal call that are needed to plan proposals.

Details about the Cycle 5 Pre-annoucnement can be found in the ALMA Science Portal.

This document summarises the final statistics related to ALMA Cycle 1 and 2 of Early Science observations, including the data reduction and delivery statistics. It includes publications statistics which show the overarching interest of the astronomy community in ALMA and the high quality of the delivered data.

The document is available as PDF and can be downloaded via the ALMA Science Portal.

A new installment of ALMA Science Verification data is available. This release contains data on the following Science Verification targets:

• Arp 220 spectral line observations in Band 5 (H2O, CS, HNC) with the 12-m Array
• SgrB2(N) spectral scan observations across most of the Band 5 tuning range with an hybrid 12m-7m array
• VY CMa spectral line polarization observations of SiO and water lines in Band 5 with the 12m array

Details of the targets are listed on the Science Verification web page:
https://almascience.eso.org/alma-data/science-verification

Allegro, the European ALMA Regional Center node in the Netherland, is organizing a science day on Thursday March 2, 2017, at Leiden
Observatory. For those interested, ALMA data reduction training with CASA will be offered on Friday March 3 at Allegro. You can indicate your interest on the event registration page linked above.

The UK ARC Node held its first  "Bring Your Own Data workshop" at Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics (UoM campus) from 21-25 November. The focus of the workshop was to explore and to work on either own ALMA data or archival data with the assistance of UK ARC Node personnel and ARC Node computing resources.

The ALMA Regional Centre (ARC) at ESO is looking for two ALMA Pipeline Processing Analysts to help with the quality assurance procedure and participate in the commissioning of the ALMA data reduction pipeline.

The deadline for this vacancy is 15 December 2016.