Memo from the ALMA Director and Operations Managers

The fundamental product of the ALMA Observatory is, and will remain, calibrated data and images. At the same time, the Observatory has been steadily increasing its performance in terms of efficiency, stability and time available for PI-driven science and, as a result, a steady increase in data production. We, at ALMA, aspire to maintain the quality of the delivered data. In the short-term, this will imply some extended data delivery timescales as the Observatory copes with the increased data load and the calibration and imaging pipeline matures to routine and more automated processing.

Following the main ALMA conference "Half a Decade of ALMA: Cosmic Dawns Transformed" held in Palm Springs (California) from 20 to 23 September 2016, the 2nd ALMA Postdoc Symposium took place during the weekend of 24/25 September. More than 15 postdocs working for the different ALMA Regional Centres gathered together to share their scientific research and knowledge about the different activities related to ALMA. This time, a number of postdocs not directly associated with the ALMA Regional Centres but working with ALMA data were invited to participate and join the discussions.

The UK ALMA Regional Centre Node would like to invite UK ALMA data users to a data reduction/processing event at Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics (UoM campus) to be held on 21 - 25 November 2016. The focus of the workshop is to explore and to work on either own ALMA data or archival data with the assistance of UK ARC Node personnel and ARC Node computing resources.

A new version of CASA, version 4.7.0. has been released. This latest release 4.7.0 is available on Linux with Red Hat and Mac OSX with El Capitan and Yosemite operating systems. CASA may also work on other flavors of Linux. The list above covers those operating systems that on which regular test are done.

More details can be obtained from the CASA Web site.

A detailed report on the outcome of the ALMA Cycle 4 Proposal Review Process is now available. The report details the proposal review process, proposal statistics and regional distributions, as well as the proposal distribution across science categories and receiver bands.

ALMA will soon start science operations of Cycle 4. We are now looking forward to hearing your opinion regarding the Science Portal, user support, ALMA Science Archive, SnooPI, data processing and products, and aspects related to the ALMA Cycle 4 Phase 2 preparation and submission.

With this purpose we kindly ask you to complete the survey at: https://almascience.eso.org/arcsurvey. The deadline for submitting your feedback is Monday, October 24 at 15:00 UT.
 

Over 200 astronomers from all around the world have gathered in Indian Wells, California, U.S.A. to participate in the Half a Decade of ALMA: Cosmic Dawns Transformed conference held between September 20 and 23 and organized by ALMA and its partners: NRAO, NAOJ and ESO. This is the third international conference presenting ALMA’s results since the Observatory began its astronomical observation cycles.

More information: www.almaobservatory.org

ALMA announces that Configuration C40-7 will not be visited in October 2016 as indicated in the Cycle 4 Proposer’s Guide.