The User Support Department again extends its sincere thanks to all those Principal Investigators and their Phase 2 delegates who participated in this year's online Paranal Service Mode User Satisfaction Survey.  A total of 146 responses were received from the targeted campaign.  As in the past, where possible, respondents who provided detailed comments have been contacted via e-mail. A summary report based on this latest User Satisfaction Survey is now available.

The European Southern Observatory’s Extremely Large Telescope (ESO’s ELT) will have a 39-metre main mirror and will be the largest telescope in the world for visible and infrared light. Construction of this technically complex project is advancing at a good pace, with the ELT now surpassing the 50% complete milestone.

The scientific objective of the XShooter ESO Large Program 1104.B-0370 INSPIRE (PI: C. Spiniello), is to create the first catalogue of spectroscopically confirmed relics in the redshift range 0.1<z<0.5, which bridges the gap between the three local confirmed relics and the high-z red nugget galaxies. The availability of this sample of objects enables to put stringent constraint on the predictions from simulations on the initial intense phase of star formation in passive galaxies.

The ESO Archive Science portal was upgraded to include previews and thumbnails of ALMA data, alongside those for La Silla Paranal. They provide a rich and concise overview of the data to guide users in identifying those of interest. Hovering with the mouse on the Actions column in the result table pops up the preview thumbnail. Clicking on the icon in the same column opens a dedicated page, where a detailed preview directly from the ALMA Science Archive is displayed. Previews and thumbnails are only presented for publicly available data, both for ALMA and La Silla Paranal.

A beta release of the new ESO Data Processing System (EDPS) is now available for download. EDPS is a system to automatically organise data from ESO instruments for pipeline processing and running the pipelines on these data. The current recommended usage of EDPS is for experimenting and batch processing. KMOS, ESPRESSO and the UVES pipelines are supported. More pipelines will be added in the next few months.

This is the first announcement of the ESO workshop 'The promise and challenges of the ALMA Wideband Sensitivity Upgrade' to take place at ESO - Garching from 24 to 28 June 2024. This upgrade constitutes the top priority of the ALMA 2030 roadmap. It consists of an increase of the instantaneous spectral bandwidth by as much as a factor of four, while retaining full spectral resolution over the entire bandwidth, thus resulting in increases of the spectral scan speed up to a factor of 50 for the highest spectral resolution. In addition, an upgrade of the full signal chain of ALMA – from the receivers and digitizers, all the way through to the correlated data – will result in increases in sensitivity for all observations.

The abstract submission and the registration for 'What was that? – an ESO workshop on planning follow up for transients, variables, and solar system objects in the era of LSST' is now open.

The latest issue 191 of ESO’s science and technology journal, The Messenger, is now available online. It features articles in celebration of the 60th anniversary of the collaboration between ESO and Chile, as well as the 10th anniversary of ALMA’s operations. The Astronomical Science section presents a selection of the scientific highlights from the first ten years of the MUSE Collaboration, as well as an overview of the VISTA Star Formation Atlas (VISIONS) public survey’s data release and scientific outlook.

The PENELLOPE Large Programme (Pr.Id. 106.20Z8) is a multi-instrument spectroscopic survey aimed at obtaining complementary data to the targets of the ULLYSES program. The latter is a Hubble Space Telescope (HST) Director’s Discretionary Time that was executed in a three-year period, from HST Cycle 27 through Cycle 29 (2020-2022). The HST ULLYSES program is aimed at obtaining low- and medium-resolution spectra of young stars covering the wavelength range from ∼140 nm to ∼1 μm, hence providing a view of accretion and ejection tracers at ultraviolet wavelengths. The PENELLOPE program is a public community-driven effort. It provides optical high-resolution (ESPRESSO, UVES, R>60,000) and medium-resolution flux-calibrated optical and infrared spectra (up to 2.5 μm) with X-Shooter (R > 10,000), giving access to information that is otherwise not obtainable with the HST spectra provided by ULLYSES, such as main stellar properties, accurate interstellar extinction, and veiling; kinematics and geometry of the accretion and wind processes, and more.  

Participants are invited to a workshop to prepare for effective follow up of alerts from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory’s Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) using European Southern Observatory (ESO) telescopes. This workshop will cover a broad range of science topics associated with variable, transient or moving objects that will be discovered in vast numbers by the LSST. It is intended to mix overview talks on how LSST will impact these fields, lessons learned from previous surveys and ESO programmes, the expected yield of discoveries from LSST, and the planned capabilities of ESO facilities in the coming decade. There will be invited talks that introduce the LSST, its alert brokers and other tools and services designed to enable follow-up observations. The workshop will include dedicated breakout sessions to plan broad community follow up programmes at ESO. Attendants of this workshop will be able to present their work with a poster/lightning talk.