The Call for Proposals for observations at ESO telescopes in Period 97 (1 April - 30 September 2016) has been released. Please consult the Call for Proposals 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 deadline for proposals is 12:00 CEST 1 October 2015.

The User Support Department (USD) invites principal investigators and their Phase 2 delegates to participate in a user feedback campaign. The survey is designed to provide USD with the opinions of the science community on a number of services, in particular related to service mode observation preparations, execution and follow-up. As such it is an important way for ESO and the USD to know where we are doing well, and where there is room for improvement.

ESO has started to distribute the instrument data reduction pipelines as RPM packages. Following the release in April 2015 of pipelines with MacPorts, RPM packages are now available for Linux users. RPM and MacPorts distributions should make the installation of pipeline software easier and less prone to errors.

As announced in February 2015, the FLAMES GIRAFFE focusing procedure has been updated, resulting in significant improvement to the spectral resolution of the instrument. The spectral resolution characterisation has been completed for all grating settings and the new resolving powers are listed under the FLAMES News.

The VLTI 2nd generation instrument GRAVITY provides a four way beam combination facility with laser metrology for micro-arcsecond astrometry and high resolution imaging and spectroscopy in the K-band, described in Eisenhauer et al 2011. The instrument has been shipped to Paranal and is undergoing testing in the integration lab. Laboratory fringes were achieved in July 2015 and the instrument will be installed in the VLTI combined laboratory later this year. More details here.

The VISTA Public Survey VISTA Variables in the Via Lactea (VVV) is a wide area (562 square degrees), near-infrared, multi-epoch imaging survey of the Milky Way Bulge and Disk. The initial survey in the five broadband filters Z, Y, J, H, Ks is followed by extensive multi-epoch observations in the Ks-band. This new release consists of three high level photometric catalogues superseding the previous release.

ESO has a prominent fellowship programme in both Garching (Germany) and Santiago (Chile), with a yearly application deadline (15 October). The goal of these fellowships is to offer outstanding early-career scientists the opportunity to further develop their independent research programmes in an exciting scientific environment with close contact to the activities and staff at ESO.

The first band- and field-merged science catalogue created from the imaging data obtained by the VST Photometric Hα Survey of the Southern Galactic Plane and Bulge (VPHAS+) has been released and it is available for download via the Catalogue Facility from the ESO Science Archive Facility.

New reduced data (spectra and images) resulting from the Public ESO Spectroscopic Survey of Transient Objects (PESSTO) are now available via the dedicated Phase 3 query interface at the ESO Science Archive Facility.

Following a recommendation by ESO's Scientific and Technical Committee (STC), a call for Letters of Intent for new Public Surveys with VIRCAM mounted on VISTA has been released. A Public Survey is understood as an observing programme in which the investigators commit to produce and make publicly available, within a defined time, a fully reduced and scientifically usable dataset that is likely to answer one or more major scientific questions, be of general use and broad interest to the astronomical community.