ESO observatories operated under challenging conditions in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, having to reduce and even pause scientific observations for a few months. Nonetheless, 2020 was still a very productive year with regard to the number of papers that were published using data from ESO telescopes, mostly obtained in previous years. A recently published report from the ESO library shows that 2020 represents the fourth consecutive year that over 1000 scientific studies using ESO data were published. The majority of these publications used data from ESO’s flagship facility, the Very Large Telescope (VLT), and the VLT Interferometer (VLTI). 

Preparations are being put in place to resume construction work on ESO’s Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) at Cerro Armazones in Chile, following disruption due to the COVID-19 pandemic, which forced the closure of the site in mid-2020. As work on manufacturing and design elements of the ELT in Europe progressed steadily, the evolution of this complex and ambitious project, set to revolutionise modern astronomy, has been closely monitored over the past year. ESO’s ELT is now expected to deliver the first scientific observations in September 2027, about half a year after an initial “telescope technical first light”.

ESO is pleased to announce the conference Atmospheres, Atmospheres! Do I look like I care about atmospheres? that will take place online from 23 to 27 August 2021. This conference will bring together the community working theoretically and observationally on understanding exoplanet atmospheres by transmission and emission spectroscopy, with an emphasis on using ground-based facilities. It aims also to bring together those working on the atmospheres of close-in exoplanets and those studying the atmospheres of giant planets in our Solar System, in order to compare methodologies and see where synergies exist or could be made.

The CRyogenic high-resolution InfraRed Echelle Spectrograph (CRIRES) has been upgraded to a cross-dispersed high-resolution infrared spectrograph. The upgraded CRIRES is now offered to the community for Science Verification (SV) for three or four nights in September 2021. All astronomers are invited to participate in this opportunity to obtain unique science with the upgraded CRIRES and thus to demonstrate its scientific capabilities. ESO encourages the community to submit highly challenging or risky science observations that will push CRIRES to its limits in order to better understand the performance parameter space and its envelope.

The latest edition of ESO's quarterly journal, The Messenger, is now available online. In this Issue 183 our readers will find a summary of ESO’s Strategy for the 2020s, learn about the prospects for future exoplanet imaging based on high-precision astrometric studies with VLT/SPHERE, as well as explore the low-surface brightness regime of galaxies thanks to the VST Early-type GAlaxy Survey (VEGAS).

Over the past several weeks, ALMA has continued to conduct PI science observations on a best-effort basis while the recovery of the Arrays has been ongoing. The first set of antenna relocations was completed on May 10, 2021, moving the 12-m Array into the C43-6 configuration. In addition, PI science using eight antennas on the 7-m Array began on May 18, 2021. The plan is to go through all remaining configurations (C43-7 to C43-10) by the end of Cycle 7, although for a shorter duration than originally planned for each configuration.

Since 2020 the ESO Cosmic Duologue series has aimed to cover the biggest questions in astronomy in a lively way. For each duologue, ESO invites two speakers to give short, dynamic talks, presenting their side of a challenging scientific topic or related to the sociology of science. Following on from the talks, the speakers debate the topic further, with the help of a moderator, and answer questions from the audience. The duologues are streamed live on a dedicated YouTube channel. The links to the videos of all past events can be found here. We invite all astronomers from the community, at any stage of their career, to propose a topic, a list of potential speakers and moderator(s) for the new series, planned for October 2021 through January 2022.

A detailed report of the Cycle 8 2021 Proposal Submission Statistics is now available. The report provides a summary of items such as the number of submitted proposals and time requested, subscription rates, and comparisons with the number of hours requested in previous Cycles.

ESO will soon deploy the new helpdesk software Deskpro to handle questions and support requests coming from the user community.  Starting on July 5^th, 2021 a new website, https://support.eso.org, will be available for all the users of ESO services, offering a knowledgebase as well as a contact form to request support.

ESO is organising the third part of the 2020/2021 La Silla Paranal Users Workshop. This year, the workshop consists of a series of online events, the first of which took place in early September 2020, followed by a second event in March 2021. At the end of July, just after the publication of the time allocation for P108, ESO will (virtually) host the third part of the workshop, focussed on the preparation and submission process of the Phase 2 material, the observing blocks.