ESO Workshop, Garching, Germany, 5 – 9 October 2015

Since the start of VLT science operations, about 15% of science time has been allocated to Large Programmes. In the last five years, the ESO Public Surveys on VISTA, VST, VLT and NTT, have vastly increased the public data delivered by La Silla Paranal telescopes. The scientific research of these Programmes and Surveys covers all areas of observational astronomy. This workshop will focus on the scientific results achieved through these programmes and the potential for enhanced exploitation of the archival data.

ESO Workshop, Garching, Germany, 30 November – 4 December 2015

The objective of this workshop is to prepare that part of the community interested in Solar System research for making the best use of the Extremely Large Telescopes (ELTs). In complement to many successful space planetary missions, ground-based observations are still essential for understanding the physico-chemical properties of Solar System objects.

The ALMA Director, on behalf of the Joint ALMA Observatory (JAO) and the partner organizations in East Asia, Europe, and North America, announces the ALMA Early Science Cycle 3 Call for Proposals for scientific observations that will be scheduled from October 2015 to September 2016. ALMA capabilities added for Cycle 3 include Band 10, and baselines up to 10 km for Bands 3, 4 and 6. The proposal submission deadline is 15:00 UT on 23 April 2015.

Since 20 March, NACO has been unavailable on VLT Unit Telescope 1. The mechanism that controls the camera objectives suffered a connection failure and CONICA had to be warmed up in order for the problem to be fixed. Since another intervention is also planned for early April to reduce the cryostat background noise (through improved thermal shielding), NACO will only be returned to science operations after mid-April. Please check the instrument news for updates.

The K-Band Multi-Object Spectrograph (KMOS) achieved a major milestone last month with the award of Provisional Acceptance Chile (PAC). This marks the official handover of the instrument to the Observatory. A major overhaul of the KMOS robotic pickoff arms was also undertaken to eliminate the problems of premature ageing, which had been discovered during routine operations over the past 18 months.

VIDEO is a deep near-infrared survey which targets ~12 square degrees over the ELAIS-S1, XMMLSS, and ECDFS extragalactic fields, and is one of the six VISTA Public Surveys. There are two new data releases from VIDEO: for CDFS (VIDEO-CDFS DR2) and ELAIS-S1 (VIDEO-ES1 DR2).

Scisoft is a project within ESO to provide a collection of astronomical software utilities in a uniform way at all ESO sites, and to make them available to the worldwide community. It was developed by ESO to run on Linux computers and primarily for internal use, but the collection is also freely distributed externally.

The term "Phase 3" was coined to denote the process whereby users are able to return science data products to ESO in order to make them available to the community at large through the Science Archive Facility. The upgrade of the Phase 3 system has now doubled the available storage space, allowing upload of more new science data products via Phase 3. In addition the underlying architecture has been improved in terms of performance, with the goal to ingest and make new data available in a shorter time than was possible before.

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 EIROforum School of Instrumentation (ESI) is a biennial event, jointly organised by the Instrumentation Working Group of the EIROforum organisations. The fourth school (ESI 2015) will be held at ESO and EUROfusion in Garching, Germany from 15-19 June 2015.