The Call for Proposals for ESO Period 97 (1 April 2016 – 30 September 2016) closed on 1 October 2015. 1020 proposals were received (the second highest, after Period 84), including 22 for Large Programmes, 48 for Target of Opportunity and 5 for Monitoring Programmes, for a total of 2212 nights. The number of proposals received shows an increase of 6.5% over Period 96.

The ESO research studentship programme provides an outstanding opportunity for Ph.D. students to experience the exciting scientific environment at one of the world's leading observatories for a period of up to two years.

The refurbishment of the VLTI laboratory, in preparation for the arrival of GRAVITY, has been completed and VLTI is ready to re-start science observations. Successful recommissioning occurred during August and September. The GRAVITY instrument was transported from the Paranal Integration Hall to the VLTI laboratory in early October 2015, an important milestone in its Assembly, Integration and Verification (AIV) and Commissioning process.

The fourth ALMA user survey was conducted between the 1 May and 1 June 2015. A total of 536 users (representing 15% of the users who were sent the questionnaire and 44% of the Cycle 3 PIs) responded to the survey. This survey focused on topics related to proposal preparation and submission, including interaction with the ARC / ARC nodes for ALMA proposal preparation and usability of tools such as the ALMA Science Portal or the helpdesk. A summary is available.

The latest ALMA Status Report, available here, includes Cycle 2 Early Science observing progress (including Cycle 1 Transfer projects), project completion and data delivery summary, Extension and Optimization of Capabilities (EOC) activity, and preparations for Cycle 4, since the last Report (November 2014).

New data products resulting from the VST Public Survey ATLAS are now available via the dedicated Phase3 query interface at the Science Archive Facility.

The Call for Proposals for observations at ESO telescopes in Period 97 (1 April - 30 September 2016) has been released. Please consult the Call for Proposals document for the main news items and policies related to applying for time on ESO telescopes. All technical information about the offered instruments and facilities is contained on ESO webpages that are linked from the Call.
The deadline for proposals is 12:00 CEST 1 October 2015.

The User Support Department (USD) invites principal investigators and their Phase 2 delegates to participate in a user feedback campaign. The survey is designed to provide USD with the opinions of the science community on a number of services, in particular related to service mode observation preparations, execution and follow-up. As such it is an important way for ESO and the USD to know where we are doing well, and where there is room for improvement.

ESO has started to distribute the instrument data reduction pipelines as RPM packages. Following the release in April 2015 of pipelines with MacPorts, RPM packages are now available for Linux users. RPM and MacPorts distributions should make the installation of pipeline software easier and less prone to errors.

As announced in February 2015, the FLAMES GIRAFFE focusing procedure has been updated, resulting in significant improvement to the spectral resolution of the instrument. The spectral resolution characterisation has been completed for all grating settings and the new resolving powers are listed under the FLAMES News.