Joint Workshop: INAF Osservatorio Astronomico di Brera and ESO
Milan City Aquarium, Italy, 9–11 October 2017

The aim of the workshop is to bring together researchers and engineers involved in the design, realization and construction of spectroscopic instrumentation, and companies and institutes that produce dispersing elements and associated optical components. The workshop provides a forum for discussing the scientific needs for future instruments and the technological challenges in developing new types of dispersing elements.

The Advanced Telescope for High ENergy Astrophysics (Athena) is the X-ray observatory mission selected by ESA within its Cosmic Vision 2015–2025 programme to address the Hot and Energetic Universe scientific theme. The ESO-Athena Synergy Team has been tasked to single out the potential scientific synergies between Athena and optical/near-infrared (NIR) and sub/mm ground-based facilities, in particular those of ESO (i.e., the VLT and ELT, ALMA and APEX).

The report on the ALMA Cycle 5 proposal submission statistics is now available. It 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.

The deadline for ALMA PIs to submit their Phase 2 material for the approved projects has been set to 7 September 2017. Users can delegate the submission of the Phase 2 material in case of unavailability. Guidelines to PIs will be made public in July.

The fifth ALMA user survey was conducted between the 22 September and 24 October 2016. Overall, the users showed a relatively high level of satisfaction. On a scale of 1 to 5 (1 being best and 5 being worst), the overall satisfaction across all ALMA regions was generally rated ~2, or better, for all the topics. The complete ALMA User Satisfaction Survey is available.
The ALMA Observatory sincerely thanks all users who took the time to answer this survey and provide valuable comments.

GALACSI is part of the Adaptive Optics Facility (AOF), and associated with the Deformable Secondary Mirror (DSM) and the 4 Laser Guide Star Facility (4LGSF). It defines an AO system developed to increase the performance of the MUSE instrument in Wide Field Mode, dubbed MUSE/AOF. Commissioning is proceeding and Science Verification is planned for August 2017, for which applications are invited.

The APEX Low-redshift Legacy Survey for MOlecular Gas ( ALLSMOG, PI J. Wagg) has observed the CO(2-1) line in a sample of 88 galaxies in the Local Universe (0.01 < z < 0.03). The ALLSMOG observations add information on cold molecular gas content of all sources in this sample and the spectra are available in the ALLSMOG Phase 3 release.

A web-based replacement for the ESO Phase 2 observing preparation tool P2PP3, named p2, has been released. Starting from Period 99 (1 April 2017), p2 is being used for (designated) Visitor Mode observations at Paranal, with the exceptions of VIMOS and GRAVITY. The plan is to extend the tool to support Service Mode by the end of 2017.

Deep 3D data cubes obtained with the Multi-Unit Spectroscopic Explorer (MUSE) in the wide field mode have been released from early data acquired in June – August 2014, plus the initial two periods of MUSE operations, P94 and P95 (October 2014 through September 2015). These deep cubes are now published via the ESO Science Archive as reduced data.The MUSE-DEEP data collection contains 209 cubes.

The VLTI instrument GRAVITY providing phase-referenced optical interferometry was first commissioned in 2016 and commissioning continues in 2017. Selected targets have been observed to demonstrate the capabilities of the instrument, develop observing strategies and optimize the data reduction pipeline. These commissioning data have now been released and are available.