The deadline for ALMA PIs to submit their Phase 2 material for the approved projects has been set to 7 September 2017. Users can delegate the submission of the Phase 2 material in case of unavailability. Guidelines to PIs will be made public in July.

The fifth ALMA user survey was conducted between the 22 September and 24 October 2016. Overall, the users showed a relatively high level of satisfaction. On a scale of 1 to 5 (1 being best and 5 being worst), the overall satisfaction across all ALMA regions was generally rated ~2, or better, for all the topics. The complete ALMA User Satisfaction Survey is available.
The ALMA Observatory sincerely thanks all users who took the time to answer this survey and provide valuable comments.

GALACSI is part of the Adaptive Optics Facility (AOF), and associated with the Deformable Secondary Mirror (DSM) and the 4 Laser Guide Star Facility (4LGSF). It defines an AO system developed to increase the performance of the MUSE instrument in Wide Field Mode, dubbed MUSE/AOF. Commissioning is proceeding and Science Verification is planned for August 2017, for which applications are invited.

The APEX Low-redshift Legacy Survey for MOlecular Gas ( ALLSMOG, PI J. Wagg) has observed the CO(2-1) line in a sample of 88 galaxies in the Local Universe (0.01 < z < 0.03). The ALLSMOG observations add information on cold molecular gas content of all sources in this sample and the spectra are available in the ALLSMOG Phase 3 release.

A web-based replacement for the ESO Phase 2 observing preparation tool P2PP3, named p2, has been released. Starting from Period 99 (1 April 2017), p2 is being used for (designated) Visitor Mode observations at Paranal, with the exceptions of VIMOS and GRAVITY. The plan is to extend the tool to support Service Mode by the end of 2017.

Deep 3D data cubes obtained with the Multi-Unit Spectroscopic Explorer (MUSE) in the wide field mode have been released from early data acquired in June – August 2014, plus the initial two periods of MUSE operations, P94 and P95 (October 2014 through September 2015). These deep cubes are now published via the ESO Science Archive as reduced data.The MUSE-DEEP data collection contains 209 cubes.

The VLTI instrument GRAVITY providing phase-referenced optical interferometry was first commissioned in 2016 and commissioning continues in 2017. Selected targets have been observed to demonstrate the capabilities of the instrument, develop observing strategies and optimize the data reduction pipeline. These commissioning data have now been released and are available.

New reduced data products resulting from the Gaia-ESO (Gaia-ESO) Public Spectroscopic Survey are now available via the dedicated Phase 3 query interface at the ESO Science Archive Facility. This third data release (DR3) provides a catalogue containing photometry and derived quantities, together with the associated wavelength calibrated 1-d spectra of point-like sources obtained with FLAMES from 31 December 2011 to 19 July 2014, for 25533 unique targets. The release also contains updated versions of these spectra reduced with the Gaia-ESO iDR5 pipelines.

ESA/ESO SCIOPS Workshop 2017 "Working together in support of science"
European Space Astronomy Centre (ESAC), Madrid, Spain, 17–20 October 2017

Science operations are becoming ever more complex and this 3rd ESA-ESO collaborative workshop will focus on the challenges that distributed science operations present to space- and ground-based projects, promoting the interchange of ideas and information between ESA, ESO and the broader community.

ESO is issuing a Delta Call, inviting proposals for VLTI time in July–September (Period 99B) with the Auxiliary Telescopes. Owing to a combination of circumstances, approximately 150 hours have become available for specific baselines in the date range 14 July – 23 September 2017 (see accompanying table).