On 26 October 2016, the ESO Finance Committee approved several major contracts for optical components as part of the European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT) construction phase. This marks another key milestone towards first light in 2024 of the world's largest optical/near-infrared telescope.

A strong Research and Development (R&D) programme is at the core of ESO's mission to build and operate state-of-the-art facilities for the advancement of astronomical research. Following the framework of the prestigious Fellowship Programme, ESO is awarding one postdoctoral fellowship to an outstanding early-career young researcher in engineering or technical disciplines to further develop her/his independent research programme by joining one of the on-going projects.

The User Support Department (USD) again extends its thanks to all those Principal Investigators and their Phase 2 delegates who filled in this September's on-line Paranal Service Mode User Satisfaction Survey. A total of 187 responses were received from our targeted campaign. We have contacted, where possible, those respondents who provided detailed comments. A summary report of this latest User Satisfaction Survey is now available.

Pipeline processed FEROS echelle data, covering the period November 2003 to the present, are now available as Science Data Products via the Phase 3 main and spectral query forms. The data consist of extracted 1D spectra in the ESO/SDP format and tar files containing the output of the FEROS pipeline.

The deadline for proposal submission for Period 99 (1 April – 1 October 2017) was 29 September 2016. 883 valid proposals were submitted, including 22 Large Programmes, of which one is a GTO Large Programme. The number of proposals for P99 is the lowest received in the last 7 periods. The time request also went down, while the number of proposals per PI remained constant. The number of normal proposals is slightly increased from P98, while Large and GTO proposals decreased. The time request decreased for almost all telescopes.

ESO Workshop, Garching, Germany, 1–3 February 2017

The frequency range from 160 to 210 GHz covered by ALMA Band 5 is one of the least explored to date. This band is expected to be offered in ALMA Cycle 5, but has already been extensively used in the SEPIA instrument on APEX since 2015. Important science topics covered by Band 5 include the 183 GHz H₂O line, a wide range of dense molecular gas tracers (HCN(2-1), HNC(2-1), HCO⁺(2-1), etc), CO(2-1) at 0.077<z<0.414, [C I] and high-J CO lines in high redshift objects, and eventually the [C II] line at z>8.

ESO Workshop, Vitacura, Santiago, Chile, 6–9 March 2017

This Workshop aims to bring together astronomers pursuing a variety of strategies in answering the question: "What constitutes a prototypical low-mass star forming region from core to cluster scales?". This question refers specifically to the formation of low-mass stars, but also involves higher-mass stars, starless cores, brown dwarfs and planet formation simultaneous with low-mass star formation, and related topics. The workshop will feature observational and theoretical/simulation studies in pursuing a comprehensive understanding of low-mass star forming regions.

The VLTI K-band beam combiner instrument GRAVITY successfully completed its second run of Science Verification (SV) in September 2016 (10–18 September). Most programmes have been completed or mostly completed (i.e., the SV team assessed that sufficient data were collected to reach the proposal goal).

KiDS is one of the ESO Public Surveys carried out with OmegaCAM at the VLT Survey Telescope (VST). Once complete, 1500 square degrees will have been observed in four filters (u, g, r, i). As a weak lensing shear tomography survey, KiDS will also map the large-scale matter distribution in the Universe and constrain the equation of state of Dark Energy. Its secondary science cases include galaxy evolution and structure of the Milky Way.

VISTA Deep Extragalactic Observations (VIDEO) is a deep near-infrared survey which targets ~12 square degrees over the ELAIS-S1, XMM-LSS, and ECDFS extragalactic fields. VIDEO belongs to the suite of six Public Surveys being conducted by the Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy (VISTA). This 4th Data Release includes images and catalogues for the three survey fields.