Kurzmeldungen

19. Dezember 2013: Due to previously unforeseen new requirements on the extended lifetime of NACO until 2018, imposed by the delay of the ERIS project, it was decided to limit the number of relocations of NACO between VLT focal stations to a single one. A careful evaluation of the scientific and technical advantages and disadvantages was discussed by the Scientific Technical Committee in a special teleconference. NACO will not be mounted on UT4 in place of HAWK-I in Period 93 as announced in the Call for Proposals but will replace CRIRES on UT1 as of September 2014. CRIRES will already be dismounted by July 2014 and handed over to the CRIRES+ upgrade project. These constraints have been used to schedule UT1 and UT4 for Period 93.

19. Dezember 2013: A page of VLT history was turned last week. After 15 years of service and more than 800 scientific publications (and still counting), ISAAC the near-infrared spectro-imager took its last scientific data. With FORS1, ISAAC was one of the first two instruments on the VLT, obtaining first light in November 1998. The last astronomical observation was of SN 2013ct in the spiral galaxy NGC 428. ISAAC was disconnected on Monday 16 December 2013, ready to be removed from the telescope. The UT3 (Melipal) Nasmyth-A focus will occupied by one of the 2nd generation instruments, SPHERE the VLT planet­ finder instrument, which will be delivered to the Paranal Observatory next year. A Messenger article is being prepared, which will summarise the main scientific achievements obtained with this workhorse instrument.

19. Dezember 2013: Proposers for ESO Period 93 (1 April–30 September 2014) have just been notified of their allocation of observing time on Paranal and La Silla instrumentation. The Phase 2 observation preparation now starts for Service Mode users. The P93 deadline for Phase 2 submission will be on Thursday, 6 February 2014. In order to prepare their Phase 2, we recommend users to download the latest release of P2PP 3.4.0. This new release of the P2PP3 tool runs under Java 7. It includes some new features requested by users, such as the possibility to import a list of absolute time intervals to a set of Observing Blocks and the automatic update of the README file when navigating between run folders (in P2PP3), without the need to close and re-open the README editor.

19. Dezember 2013: ESO-Garching Operations will provide only minimal support during the Christmas–New Year holiday period, mostly limited to core operational tasks. Full support (user) services will resume on 2 January 2014.

19. Dezember 2013: The proposal submission deadline for ALMA Early Science Cycle 2 proposals closed on the 5 December 2013. A total of 1382 proposals were received, requesting 7314 hours of 12-metre array time and 3325 hours of Morita Array (ALMA Compact Array, ACA) time. ToO observations were requested in 24 proposals. A total of 1049 individual PIs and 3408 proposers (PIs and CoIs) were involved in the submitted proposals. The percentage of submitted proposals per band in the 12-metre array was 25% (Band 3), 5% (Band 4), 29% (Band 6), 32% (Band 7), 4% (Band 8) and 5% (Band 9). The distribution of proposals across science categories was 21% (Cosmology and the high redshift Universe), 26% (Galaxies and galactic nuclei), 26% (ISM, star formation and astrochemistry), 18% (Circumstellar Disks, exoplanets and the Solar System ) and 9% (Stellar evolution and the Sun). The ALMA review panels will meet in March 2014 and ...

19. Dezember 2013: The 81st Scientific Technical Committee (STC) meeting was held on 22–23 October 2013. The STC meets twice a year, is composed of representatives from the ESO member states and is the primary interface between the scientific community and the telescope and instrumentation projects. The STC also has sub-committees for the La Silla Paranal Observatory (LSP), ALMA and APEX (European Science Advisory Committee, ESAC) and for E-ELT (ESC). The ESC was constituted by ESO Council in June and met for the first time this October. The recommendations of the STC report are available and cover the ESO Budget and Forward Look to 2017, implementation of the matrix structure at ESO, progress updates on all major ESO programmes — in particular on VLTI/PRIMA developments, the achievements of ALMA as it begins the transition towards full operations and the E-ELT.

19. Dezember 2013: Version 2.5 of the ESO data reduction environment Reflex has been released. Reflex provides an easy interface to run and supervise VLT data reduction pipelines. Reflex can be installed with a self-explanatory installation script and the workflows are pre-configured to run right out of the box on demo or user data. All Reflex workflows come with a detailed step-by-step tutorials, and a detailed discussion of the design principles has been presented by Freudling et al, 2013, AA 559, 96. The new version of Reflex includes workflows for the most frequently used VLT instruments (FORS, UVES, VIMOS, SINFONI) and the 2nd generation VLT instruments (X-Shooter, KMOS). The Reflex environment was also substantially upgraded, and now includes support for non-interactive batch processing and improved features to browse and investigate pipeline results.

19. Dezember 2013: The collection of pipeline-processed high-resolution spectral data obtained with UVES has been significantly extended, now also including the observations that make use of the image slicers. In addition to the previously announced UVES data release, over 10 000 individual spectra, acquired 2003 - 2013, are now available from the Science Archive Facility. The data consist of extracted wavelength- and, whenever possible, flux-calibrated 1-dimensional spectra in tabular format following the established science data products standard. The data products, tagged “UVES_ECHELLE”, can be queried and downloaded. More details about the data can be found in the updated Phase 3 data release description. Data products become publicly accessible once the proprietary period (usually one year) has expired; before that date, access is restricted to the PI of the observing programme and collaborators.

19. Dezember 2013: The VISTA Kilo-degree Infrared Galaxy Survey (VIKING), one of the 6 VISTA public surveys, is a wide area (eventually ~1500 square degrees), intermediate-depth (5-sigma detection limit J~21 [Vega]) near-infrared imaging survey, in the 5 broadband filters Z, Y, J, H, Ks. The first VIKING data release, which is based on observations until mid-February 2011, covers 226 square degrees in all 5 filters and consists of 14.7 million sources (including low-reliability single-band detections). The previously announced release of calibrated images is now complemented by the VIKING five-band photometric catalogue recording coordinates, fluxes, colour indices, morphological parameters and associated quality information (160 parameters per object), with a total data volume over 9 GB. The entire dataset or user-defined subsets are fully searchable and accessible from the catalogue facility query interface.

19. Dezember 2013: The December 2013 issue of The Messenger contains a section with summaries of ten of the eleven ESO public surveys, together with an introductory overview on the progress of the public surveys. The whole issue, or individual articles, can be downloaded.

19. Dezember 2013: Galaxies and active galactic nuclei (AGN) are not randomly distributed in the Universe. The distribution of AGN, measured by clustering, enables new insights into the physical conditions that govern the accretion onto supermassive black holes and high precision AGN clustering can provide constraints on cosmological parameters. AGN clustering measurements have gained significant interest in the last decade and upcoming large surveys will generate AGN samples with several million objects. These surveys offer the unique opportunity to study AGN and galaxy co-evolution, AGN physics, and cosmology with AGN clustering measurements. This ESO workshop, which will be the first ever dedicated workshop on AGN clustering, aims to summarise our current understanding of AGN clustering and how the community should prepare for upcoming data sets and challenges. More details are available on the workshop web page or by email. Registration will open soon.

28. November 2013: ALMA proposals for Cycle 2 have been arriving since the publication of the Call for Proposals on 24 October 2013. ALMA Early Science Cycle 2, will start in June 2014. This Call provides an important opportunity for Early Science from this cutting-edge facility. The Cycle 2 period will span 17 months and users of any professional background, nationality, or affiliation may submit proposals. It is anticipated that about 2000 hours of time on the 12-metre array and the Atacama Compact Array will be available for Cycle 2 projects and high priority projects transferred from Cycle 1. A list of the metadata from Cycle 1 proposals designated for transfer into Cycle 2 has been posted, so that Cycle 2 Principal Investigators can avoid duplicating these observations. A Cycle 2 Observing Tool (OT) update was released on 18 November and all users should install this update. The ALMA Cycle 2 proposal submission ...

28. November 2013: The Gaia–ESO survey is the first of the ESO public spectroscopic surveys. It is a systematic study of more than 100 000 stars covering all the major components of the Milky Way. Data products resulting from the first release of the Gaia–ESO Public Spectroscopic Survey are now available via the dedicated Phase 3 query interface at the ESO Science Archive Facility. This data release consists of wavelength calibrated one-dimensional spectra of point-like sources in tabular format following the established standard for ESO science data products, and obtained with FLAMES from 31 December 2011 to 30 June 2012 under ESO programme ID 188.B-3002. The total number of data files in this release is 5654, comprising spectra of 3834 unique targets. The total data volume of this release is 1.3 GB. The Gaia-ESO public survey data release is accompanied by a comprehensive description. Instructions on how to read or display data in ...

28. November 2013: ATLAS is a ugriz imaging survey targeting ~4500 square degrees of the southern sky with the VLT Survey Telescope (VST). Data products resulting from the first release of the ATLAS public survey are now available via the dedicated Phase 3 query interface at the ESO Science Archive Facility. This data release consists of the stacked reduced images and associated source lists from the start of observations in August 2011 to end September 2012 under ESO programme ID 177.A-3011. The imaging data comprise the combination of the two individual pawprint images which go to make an ATLAS stacked pawprint in each field. The passbands covered are SDSS ugriz reaching approximately the same depth (r~22) as the SDSS survey in the northern hemisphere. The data release comprises a total of 32 031 data files occupying ~3TB in its default Rice compression. The total area covered is ~1000 square degrees. The ATLAS public ...

28. November 2013: A public interferometric survey of the gaseous circumstellar environments of hot stars is being conducted. It is named OHANA — the Observatory survey at High ANgular resolution of Active OB stars. The survey is a bad weather/filler programme currently carried out by the VLTI group at the Paranal Observatory. The targets are selected from three classes: Be stars; supergiants and LBVs; and interacting binaries. The data are taken with the AMBER instrument in its high spectral resolution setting (R=12000). The data are available immediately through the ESO archive under programme 092.D-0289. Quick-look reductions are published soon after and can be obtained from a dedicated forum. More details, including the proposal, can be found here.

28. November 2013: The PIONIER science meeting will be held on 13–14 January 2014, followed by the VLTI community days (15–16 January), and is organized by IPAG, ESO and Eii. The spirit of the meeting is to provide a direct way for the community to exchange ideas with those at ESO who take care of the VLTI. The latest VLTI results will be presented, and there will be discussions on ongoing projects, innovative scientific use of VLTI and preparation for its future evolution. Three milestones justify this gathering: the offering of PIONIER to a wider community, the arrival of GRAVITY (in 2015) and MATISSE (in 2016). More details at the workshop web site.

24. Oktober 2013: The ALMA Early Science Cycle 2 Call for Proposals has been issued. The full Call and all the information and tools relevant for proposal preparation are available through the ALMA Science Portal. The proposal deadline is 5 December 2013 with the start of Cycle 2 observations expected in June 2014. Cycle 1 high priority projects that remain uncompleted at that time will be transferred into Cycle 2 upon PI approval; see the status report for details. User support, including face-to-face assistance, is provided by the European ALMA Regional Centre (ARC). For any questions or further information please contact the European ARC through the ALMA Helpdesk.

24. Oktober 2013: Exoplanet research is one of the major science drivers for the future European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT). This community workshop will explore the science cases and the planned capabilities of the E-ELT in the field of exoplanet research. The aim is to provide a synthesis of the goals to be achieved by the E-ELT with its planned instrumentation in the field of exoplanets and the most relevant issues in exoplanet science for the next decade. Topics to be discussed include: initial conditions for planet formation; planetary populations determined from detection surveys; characterisation through resolved imaging and direct and transit spectroscopy and the search for habitable planets. Further details here or by email to exoelt2014@eso.org. The registration deadline is 15 November 2013.

24. Oktober 2013: Herbig Ae/Be (HAeBe) stars are a class of early-type pre-main sequence objects whose stellar mass corresponds to the transition regime between Solar-type stars and high-mass stars. They are generally bright at most wavelengths allowing a detailed view of their evolving environment and are pivotal objects for the formation of both stars and planets. The high-resolution observational and theoretical advances of the past 10 to 15 years provide the primary motivation and the evolution of the circumstellar disc material constitutes the main, but not the exclusive topic, for the workshop. Areas to be addressed include circumstellar disc structure, transition and debris discs, disc dispersal, jets and outflows, young clusters and the impact of future instrumentation. This workshop will commemorate the life and work of George H. Herbig (2 January 1920 – 12 October 2013). Herbig pioneered the field of star formation, especially that of young stars and their nebulous surroundings. A ...

24. Oktober 2013: After a very successful start of commissioning in November 2012, KMOS officially began scientific operations this month. KMOS is an integrated-field-unit (24 sub-fields), medium-resolution (R~3000–4000) spectrograph covering the 0.8–2.5 micron region of the spectrum. After X-Shooter, which started operations 4 years ago, KMOS is the second of the second-generation VLT instruments now in operation at the VLT. Next year will be quite busy at Paranal with the start of commissioning of two other instruments from the second generation: MUSE, a visible-range adaptive-optics assisted integral-field-unit spectrograph, and the multi-mode planet-finder instrument SPHERE.