The VISTA EXtension to Auxiliary Surveys (VEXAS, Spiniello & Agnello, 2019, A&A, 630) project aims at building wide and spatially homogeneous multi-wavelength catalogues (from X- ray to radio) providing reference magnitudes, colors and morphological information for a large number of scientific uses. Currently the VEXAS catalogue is the widest and deepest public optical-to-IR photometric and spectroscopic database in the Southern Hemisphere, comprising more than 90 million objects with reliable photometry measured in at least one of the VISTA infrared bands, two of the WISE bands and three optical bands.

The Virtual OPTICON Archival School Using ESO and ALMA Data will take place on 19 - 26 June 2021. In this school  the students will do a project using data available either in the ESO or ALMA archive, lead by an experienced tutor who will guide the students in retrieving, reducing and analysing the data. This school is mainly meant for PhD students, but also MSc students in the later stages of their studies and young postdocs can be considered.

The Cube Analysis and Rendering Tool for Astronomy (CARTA), a new image visualisation and analysis tool designed for ALMA, VLA, and SKA pathfinders, has been integrated into the ALMA Science Archive (ASA). Now all 500,000+ science FITS files in the ALMA archive can be previewed using CARTA (Cycle 0 excluded).

The Users Committee (UC) represents ESO's astronomical community at large and acts as an advisory body to the ESO Director General on matters related to the performance, scientific access, operation and user interfaces to the La Silla Paranal Observatory and ALMA. The annual meeting of the UC is scheduled on 27 and 28 April 2021. 

The installation of the upgraded CRIRES at the VLT, also known as CRIRES⁺, was completed in late February last year, with first light expected to happen shortly after. However, the COVID-19 pandemic forced the delay of the Commissioning for almost a year. With the ramping up of the Paranal Observatory in November 2020, the CRIRES instrument was reactivated on the 4^th of December 2020 and the commissioning activities took place starting on January 18^th, 2021 with 8 nights and February 18^th with 6 nights. Due to the deadline for the call for proposals only the results of Commissioning 1 could be included and the instrument is offered during Period 108 with a subset of modes.

The latest edition of ESO's quarterly journal, The Messenger, is now available online. Issue 182 is a special one dedicated to the instrumentation programme for ESO’s Extremely Large Telescope (ELT). It features articles detailing the status of the ELT instrumentation programme, as well as presentations of each instrument individually. This issue also contains science results based on SINFONI and MUSE, as well as profiles from two ESO fellows describing what sparked their interest in astronomy and their respective paths to ESO. The issue closes with a tribute to Nichi D’Amico, ESO Council representative for Italy, who passed away in September 2020.

Period 108 marks the full deployment of the Dual-Anonymous Peer Review (DAPR) in the evaluation of proposals for observations at ESO telescopes. Applicants must formulate the scientific rationales of their proposals following the anonymisation rules and examples described in this link, which also gives a detailed description of the DAPR paradigm. While Period 106 was used as a dry run, both to make the community aware of the upcoming implementation of DAPR and to test its practical, procedural and policy aspects, from Period 108 proposal anonymisation is mandatory. Failure to abide by the DAPR rules may lead to disqualification of the proposal.

The Call for Proposals for observations at ESO telescopes in Period 108 (1 October 2021 – 31 March 2022) has been released. Please consult the Period 108 document for the main news items and policies related to applying for time on ESO telescopes. All technical information about the offered instruments and facilities is contained on ESO webpages that are linked from the Call. The proposal submission deadline is 12:00 CET 25 March 2021.

ESO is organising the second part of the 2020/2021 La Silla Paranal Users Workshop. This year, the workshop consists of a series of online events, the first of which took place in early September. On March 3rd, just after the publication of the Call for Proposal for P108, ESO will (virtually) host the second part of the workshop, focussed on the proposal preparation and submission process.

The fourth and final data release of the deep VIMOS survey of the CANDELS UDS and CDFS fields, VANDELS, is now available in the ESO Science Archive Facility. The VANDELS survey (Programme id 194.A-2003, PI L. Pentericci and R. McLure) started data acquisition in November 2014 and was completed in March 2018 before the VIMOS decommissioning. It delivers high signal-to-noise (range: 10 -100), medium resolution (R~600) optical spectra (4800-10000 Å) for galaxies in the UKIDSS Ultra Deep Survey (UDS) and Chandra Deep Field South (CDFS) survey fields. The total area covered is 0.2 degree².