The ESO research studentship programme provides an outstanding opportunity for PhD students to experience the exciting scientific environment at one of the world's leading observatories. ESO's studentship positions are open to students enrolled in a university PhD programme in astronomy or related fields. Students accepted into the programme work on their doctoral project under the formal supervision of their home university supervisor, but they come to ESO to work and study under the co-supervision of an ESO staff astronomer for a period of between one and two years.

The Offices for Science and the Astronomy Faculty are very pleased to present the 2022 ESO Fellows. Here is an introduction to the Fellows due to start in Germany and Chile later this year.

The Fizeau exchange visitors programme in optical interferometry, funded by OPTICON/H2020, aims at funding travel and accommodation for visits of researchers to an institute of their choice, within the European Community, to perform collaborative work and training on one of the active topics of the European Interferometry Initiative. The visits will typically last for one month, and strengthen the network of astronomers engaged in technical, scientific and training work on optical/infrared interferometry, including with VLTI. Researchers willing to visit the VLTI Expertise Centres are strongly encouraged to use this programme to fund the exchange. Fellowships can be awarded for missions to be carried out between August 2022 and January 2023, and the deadline for applications is May 15, 2022.

Phase 3 denotes the process of preparation, validation and ingestion of science data products (SDPs) in the ESO science archive facility, and subsequent data publication to the scientific community. SDPs are data products with instrument and atmospheric signatures removed, calibrated in physical units, with noise properties (like limiting magnitude or signal-to-noise ratio) quantified and documented. Version 8 of the ESO Science Data Products standard is now published.

VIDEO (under programme ID 179.A-2006, PI: Jarvis) is a deep near-infrared survey which targets ~12 square degrees over the ELAIS-S1, XMM-LSS, and E-CDFS extragalactic fields. VIDEO belongs to the suite of the first cycle Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy (VISTA) public surveys conducted at ESO and now completed.

The annual public release of ESO VLT/VLTI instruments data reduction software packages is scheduled for end of May 2022. Please note that the new pipeline packages will be released for the following operating systems: Fedora 33, 34, 35; Scientific Linux 7; CentOS 7; macOS 10.15, 11 and 12

The ALMA Director, on behalf of the Joint ALMA Observatory (JAO) and the partner organisations in East Asia, Europe, and North America, is pleased to announce the ALMA Cycle 9 Call for Proposals (CfP) for scientific observations to be scheduled from October 2022 to September 2023. Proposal submission opened at 24 March 2022, 15:00 UT and the submission deadline is 21 April 2022, 15:00 UT. More information can be found on the ALMA Science Portal.

The deadline for proposal submission for Period 110 (1 October 2022 - 31 March 2023) was 25 March, 2022. 871 valid proposals were submitted, including 33 Large Programmes. On the VLT the most requested ESO instrument was MUSE with a request of 449 nights, followed by X-Shooter with 258 nights. HARPS on the ESO 3.6-metre telescope was the most demanded instrument at La Silla (and fourth most demanded instrument overall), with 184 nights.

Following an incremental ramp-up plan, La Silla Paranal Observatory has been supporting science operations for all telescopes and systems over the past months. As of March 29, the Observatory moves one more step ahead, to the ‘Full Operations’ mode. This step lifts several of the limitations that have been present since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, while still maintaining a basic set of sanitary restrictions on site. For science users the most important change is that as of June 2022 the observatory will again welcome visiting astronomers on site.

The latest edition of ESO's quarterly journal, The Messenger, is now available online. In this Issue 186 readers will find an article about the ongoing search for quiescent black holes, which has detected stripped stars instead. The issue continues with an overview of the ALMACAL project, describing this survey based on ALMA calibrator observations. Further, readers will be able to learn more about the processes that drive the evolution of isolated magnetic white dwarfs.