The Joint ALMA Observatory released the following statement today regarding a recent cyberattack that has affected ALMA services:

On October 29, 2022, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) suffered a cyberattack on its computer systems, forcing the suspension of astronomical observations and the public website. This event is under investigation by local authorities. The Computing team quickly isolated the Antennas and Correlator systems and the Science Archive data systems. However, communication and other operational clusters were affected, forcing ALMA to stop all observations. Since then, email communication has been restored safely, along with new collaboration tools that enable the staff to continue their regular work.

The Crisis Management Team has developed a full-recovery plan in consultation with cyber security officers from ESO/NAOJ/NRAO. Our highest priority is to work hard to resume observations before the end of the year.

The second data release, the large program "MUSE Analysis of Gas around Galaxies project - MAGG" (ESO programme ID: 197.A-0384, PI: M. Fumagalli) provides the community with 28 high-quality VLT/MUSE cubes centred on bright redshift z~3-4.5 quasars (Lofthouse et al. 2020).

The Peer Review Under Review conference will take place at the Headquarters of the European Southern Observatory in Garching, Germany, from February 6 to 10, 2023. The conference aims at bringing experts from diverse environments to assess the current and future challenges, methodologies and other aspects of the peer review processes.

Registration is now open!

The web letters announcing the outcome of the proposal evaluation process and the La Silla Paranal Observatory schedule for odd semesters are usually released by the end of December. For P111, there is a foreseen delay of one month, moving the release of the web letters and the schedule to the beginning of February 2023. The Phase 2 deadline for submission of observing material for Service Mode observations will be shifted according to the envisaged web letters release. The deadline will be set four weeks after the P111 schedule announcement. The priority in the review of the submitted Phase 2 material will be given to the programmes with early targets to ensure the regular start of the P111 observing period on 1 April 2023.

All ESO data reduction pipelines are currently written in the C programming language using ESO's Common Pipeline Library (CPL) and the pipeline recipes are executed using either the Esorex command line tool, or the ESOReflex GUI. Recently, ESO released an early version of PyCPL that provides Python language bindings for CPL. This opens a new interface to the ESO pipelines.