ESO Headquarters, Garching, Germany, 13–15 April 2015

The ESO ALMA Regional Centre (ARC) will organise another Community Days workshop at ESO Headquarters in order to optimally prepare the European astronomical community for ALMA Cycle 3. The call for Cycle 3 observing proposals will be released in March 2015 and the main new scientific capability will be significantly longer baselines than in previous cycles.

An ALMA status report for November 2014 is available. The report ( PDF) summarizes the status and recent progress of Cycle 2 Early Science observations as of October 2014, including "Cycle 1 Transfer" projects. It includes the 12-m array configuration schedule for the rest of Cycle 2 and a summary of the number of unfinished “high priority” observations. The report also contains plans and references to ongoing work as part of the “Extension and Optimization of Capabilities (EOC)” and preparations for Cycle 3.

ESO Headquarters, Garching, Germany, 15–17 April 2015

All Herschel science data, and some user-provided data products, are publicly available through the Herschel Science Archive. Meanwhile, the ALMA Science Archive is being populated with observations from the first three Cycles, with more data released daily. The higher frequency ALMA bands overlap with the lower frequency Herschel bands, and, despite the huge difference in spatial resolution, Herschel sources provide ideal targets for ALMA follow-up. In order to explore the full potential of both archives, archival users need to be aware of the contents and differences.

ESO Workshop, ESO Headquarters, Garching, Germany, 6–10 July, 2015
Mass loss from cool Asymptotic Giant Branch and Red Supergiant stars inputs large amounts of material to the ISM and is therefore an important process for understanding stellar lifecycles and galactic ecology. Significant advances in observations (e.g. VLTI, ALMA and other facilities), and theory, now provide an opportunity to revisit outstanding questions of late stellar evolution, such as the role of mass loss, magnetic fields and binarity. The aim of the meeting is to bring together observers and theorists from the low and high mass stellar communities with the goals of exploring the commonalities of evolved star mass loss.

The most recently installed instrument at Paranal, the ESO Planet-finder instrument SPHERE, underwent its last commissioning run during 05 – 15 October 2014. SPHERE saw first light on 04 May 2014 (see the Release) and was followed by three periods of commissioning in May, July and August 2014.

After a year at UT3, X-shooter was re-installed at UT2 earlier this month to make room for the re-commissioning and integration of VISIR on UT3, which will start next month. In spite of poor weather conditions, which delayed the precise measurement of the telescope focus for X-shooter, the long list of recommissioning tasks, were completed as planned, thanks to the efficient work of the science and engineering teams. Routine science operations with X-shooter have re-commenced.

Pipeline processed HARPS echelle data are now available as Science Data Products via the Phase 3 spectral query form. The data consist of 1D spectra in the ESO/SDP format and the tar files containing unaltered output of the HARPS pipeline (DRS v. 3.5), as previously available.

ESO Workshop, Vitacura, Santiago, Chile, 23–27 March 2015

Angular and spectral resolutions are fundamental limitations to our understanding of the properties of galaxies in the nearby and distant Universe. The advent of state-of-the-art facilities with high angular and spectral resolution capabilities coupled with high sensitivity, such as ALMA, allows the interstellar medium and star formation properties of galaxies at intermediate redshift to be probed in unprecedented detail, along with their counterparts in the local Universe.

The proposal submission for ESO Period 95 (1 April – 30 September 2015) closed on 01 October 2014. 931 proposals were received, including 17 Large Programme and 50 Target of Opportunity (ToO) proposals, for a total of 2428 nights.

The Multi-Object Optical and Near-infrared Spectrograph (MOONS) is a red and near-infrared (0.64 – 1.8 μm), medium (R=4000) and high (R=20000) resolution, multi-object spectrograph with 1024 fibres, planned for installation at the  VLT Nasmyth focus in 2018. The agreement to build MOONS was recently signed between ESO and the MOONS Consortium, composed of institutes from the ESO Member States and led by the UK STFC. See the public announcement for details.