A call for ideas for scientific projects with the ESO New Technology Telescope (NTT) at the La Silla Observatory has been issued.

This call opens new opportunities for large scientific projects at the NTT. In order to enable telescope access for innovative ideas, upgraded or new scientific instruments, up to 50% of the telescope time from 2016 to 2020 will be made available to selected projects in return for contributions to the NTT operation.

For the first phase of the definition of these projects, ESO is requesting ideas for scientific projects to be submitted no later than 31 March 2014. For details see the full text of the Call in PDF.

The User Support Department (USD) invites principal investigators and their Phase 2 delegates to participate in the most recent user feedback campaign. This newly revamped 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.

Participating in the survey should take no more than 5-10 minutes, and it can be found here.

ALMA Cycle 1 science observations continued until 28 January 2014 and started again during the third week of February. Seven periods of observations of about 100 hours each have been executed, and about 35% of the estimated number of observation executions needed for Cycle 1 have been completed. All observed data are under analysis or have been delivered to scientists.

Tokyo International Forum, Tokyo, Japan, 8-11 December 2014

The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) has been producing a growing number of impressive and transformational science results as the most powerful mm/submm interferometer in the world. Held in central Tokyo, the aim of this workshop is to highlight the science results from ALMA obtained during the first three years of science operations. The science topics include all fields of astronomy: cosmology and galaxies in the distant Universe; nearby galaxies and the Galactic Centre; the interstellar medium and star formation in our own Galaxy; astrochemistry, circumstellar disks, exoplanets and the Solar System; stellar evolution and solar physics; and fundamental physics.

ESO Workshop, ESO Headquarters, Garching, Germany, 13-17 October 2014

The study of stellar populations is one of the most relevant diagnostics to constrain galaxy formation and evolution. Quantitative analyses of the stellar content of galaxies pave the way to 'convert' starlight into physical quantities like stellar masses, chemical abundances and star formation rates, and to trace the evolution and chemical enrichment history of galaxies.

The ESO Director General, Tim de Zeeuw, presented a plenary talk at the 223rd American Astronomical Society meeting, held in Washington DC, 5-9 January 2014, entitled "ESO: Present and Future". The talk outlined the development of ESO, summarized the current programme and considered perspectives for the coming decades. A PDF copy of the presentation can be downloaded.

The 93rd Observing Programmes Committee met on 18-21 November 2013 and recommended three new Large Programmes (one for La Silla, one for Paranal, one for APEX) and one Calibration Programme (UT1/ KMOS). A total of 1079 (10-hour equivalent) nights of visitor and service mode observations on VLT, VISTA and VST, the 3.6-metre, NTT and APEX have been allocated.

The Public ESO Spectroscopic Survey of Transient Objects (PESSTO) is one of the two on-going ESO public spectroscopic surveys. PESSTO aims to deliver high-quality, time series optical and near-infrared spectroscopy of optical transients covering a broad range of luminosity, host metallicity and explosion mechanisms. A summary of PESSTO is available (PDF). Data products resulting from the first release of PESSTO are now available via the Phase 3 query interface at the ESO Science Archive Facility.

VIDEO is a deep near-infrared survey targeting ~12 square degrees over the ELAIS-S1, XMM-LSS and ECDFS extragalactic fields. VIDEO belongs to the suite of six public surveys being conducted with VISTA. The first public data release (DR1) of the VIDEO programme via the ESO Science Archive Facility, contained 97 individual (i.e. single-OB) tile images in the VIDEO-XMM3 field and their associated single-band source lists. This release (VIDEO-XMM DR2) adds 156 single-OB images in the VIDEO-XMM fields 1, 2 and 3.

The online interface to the Atacama Pathfinder Experiment (APEX) LABOCA and SABOCA calibration data has been significantly updated. The query pages for zenith opacities and calibration factors are affected. The calibration dataset has been fully re-reduced for both bolometer cameras, leading to improvements and using more precise algorithms to better estimate the sky opacity values. Extensive help pages have been added, including descriptions on how to use these data in BoA.