The Swedish-ESO PI receiver for APEX (SEPIA) is a new instrument that is currently being commissioned. It will initially host an ALMA Band 5 receiver covering 159 to 211 GHz in dual-polarization, sideband-separating bands of 4 GHz width. SEPIA is offered for regular proposals in Period 96 (see the Call for Proposals), but ESO also invites the community to submit short Science Verification proposals with a deadline of 18 March 2015. Please find further details here.

The User Support Department (USD) invites principal investigators and their Phase 2 delegates to participate in the most recent user feedback campaign. The survey is designed to provide USD with the opinions of the science community on a number of services. As such it is an important way for the department to know where we are doing well, and where there is room for improvement.

The FLAMES GIRAFFE spectrograph is not kept at a controlled temperature, and thus, at the beginning of every observing block, GIRAFFE is re-focussed to take account of collimator temperature. The best focus position depends on temperature, grating and wavelength setting. The FLAMES Instrument Operation Team discovered that the software coefficients used to set the focus of GIRAFFE have changed since commissioning – presumably because of aging effects in the optics – and have measured and updated these coefficients. The updated values lead to a substantial increase in spectral resolution and sensitivity across all settings, particularly for the high resolution (HR) settings.

The ESO Library develops and maintains two major information resources: the telescope bibliography (telbib), a database of refereed articles that use observational data from ESO facilities, and the library catalogue. In order to provide an optimal viewing experience from a large number of devices, the web interfaces of both tools have been adjusted using the Responsive Web Design (RWD) approach. This assures that users can search and navigate both sites from various screens, including desktop computers, tablets and smartphones, with minimal resizing and scrolling. Please try these resources from your favourite device.

The European ARC network is organising a series of community events in preparation for ALMA Cycle 3 (expected deadline 23 April 2015). The purpose of these events is to introduce the new ALMA capabilities to the community, help ALMA users with their proposal preparation, and trigger new ideas for an even more efficient use of the ALMA facility.

A new installment of ALMA Science Verification (SV) data is available. This release contains several new datasets corresponding to four targets observed as part of the 2014 ALMA Long Baseline Campaign in order to demonstrate the long baseline (~10 km), high angular resolution, capability of ALMA. Maximum baselines used ranged from 12.2 to 14.9 km.

ESO one-dimensional (1D) spectra in tabular FITS format can now be displayed and processed with IRAF using the external package SPTABLE, thanks to a close collaboration between ESO and the IRAF developers. The popular IRAF ONEDSPEC package, including SPLOT, and the IRAF RV package are now able to process the 1D spectra from the spectroscopic ESO Public Surveys (PESSTO and Gaia-ESO), Large Programmes (ESSENCE, GOODS FORS2+VIMOS, and zCOSMOS) and internal data products (UVES ECHELLE, XSHOOTER ECHELLE and HARPS).

The VISTA Magellanic Survey (VMC) is releasing a new catalogue based on the Point Spread Function (PSF) photometry in three bands Y, J and Ks, in addition to the aperture matched catalogue, VMC Catalogue DR2, available since 7 January 2015. The PSF photometry catalogue is extracted from the deep tile images completed before October 2012. The VMC-PSF catalogue contains 12.7 million sources and covers an area of 7.5 square degrees in the LMC and 3.5 square degrees in the SMC. An extensive release description is available.

VISTA Deep Extragalactic Observations (VIDEO) is a deep near-infrared Public Survey which targets ~12 square degrees over the ELAIS-S1, the XMM-Newton Large Scale Structure (XMM LSS) and Extended Chandra Deep Field South (ECDFS) extragalactic fields. In this release (VIDEO-XMM DR3) a total of 560 individual single-OB tile images and the associated single-band source lists in the XMM LSS field are available, which have been reprocessed using version 1.3 of the VISTA reduction pipeline.

Both the VISTA Kilo-degree Infrared Galaxy Survey (VIKING) and the VST Kilo-Degree Survey (KiDS) are making their second data releases. The VIKING release covers all the highest quality data (images, weightmaps, single-band source lists) taken since the start of the survey in November 2009 up to September 2013. The KiDS release consists of coadded images, weight maps, masks and single-band source lists for 98 tiles that were completed between October 2012 and September 2013. The release also contains the associated multi-band source VIKING + KiDS catalogue of 17 million sources.