ESO Workshop, ESO Headquarters, Garching, Germany, 24–28 November 2014

Recent years have seen a huge development in high-resolution techniques, which are critical to progress in many different areas of astronomy. These techniques can be divided into direct methods (e.g., adaptive optics, lucky imaging), interferometry (including speckle imaging and spectro-astrometry) and reconstruction methods (astrotomography). This workshop aims to bring together the different communities working in these fields increasing the synergies among them.

The science verification (SV) for the Multi-Unit Spectroscopic Explorer (MUSE) will take place on the nights of 20–29 June 2014. All community astronomers are kindly invited to participate in this opportunity to obtain early science with MUSE and thus to demonstrate the scientific capabilities of this unique instrument.

The 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 proposal submission for ESO Period 94 closed on 27 March 2014. 901 proposals were received requesting 2389 nights in total, including 23 Large Programme and 44 Target of Opportunity (ToO) proposals.

Two software tools to correct astronomical spectra for telluric absorption (molecfit) and emission (skycorr) lines have been publicly released. They have been developed for ESO by a team of astronomers at the Institute for Astro- and Particle Physics at the University of Innsbruck, as part of the Austrian in-kind contribution. In addition, a model of the sky emission and transmission spectrum at Cerro Paranal is also available.

The VISTA Magellanic Survey (VMC) – one of the six public surveys current at the Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy (VISTA) – aims at determining the spatially resolved star formation history and 3D geometry of the Magellanic system. The VMC survey is designed to reach stars below the oldest main-sequence turn-off and the multi-epoch strategy enables accurate Ks mean magnitudes for variable stars, e.g. RR Lyrae stars and Cepheids, to be measured. Catalogues from some of the deep co-added survey images have now been released.

VIDEO is a deep near-infrared survey which targets ~12 square degrees over the Elais-S1, XMM-LSS, and extended Chandra Deep Field South (CDFS) extragalactic fields. VIDEO belongs to the suite of six public surveys being conducted at the Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy (VISTA). First data releases of the Elais-S1 and CDFS fields have just been made available.

The latest integral field spectrograph (IFS) on the VLT, the Multi-Unit Spectroscopic Explorer (MUSE), has recently undergone its first commissioning period - see details in the Release. A second commissioning period will take place in April followed by Science Verification a few months later. MUSE is first offered to the community for observation in Period 94 (October 2014 – March 2015).

A new observing time calculator is now available for the Artemis 350µm camera offered on APEX in Period 94. This calculator assumes a field of view of 4.7×2.5 arcminutes, with fully sampled pixels in the 350µm focal plane. The 450µm and 200µm planes are not offered in Period 94. Note that this is only a preliminary version of the calculator, as the full commissioning of Artemis will be performed in June 2014.

Statistics on refereed publications in 2013 that make use of data from ESO telescopes have been released by the ESO library. The statistics are calculated using the ESO Telescope Bibliography (telbib), a database of refereed publications that use ESO data. The annual summary of the publication statistics, with breakdown by telescopes and instruments and comparison with other observatories, is available as Basic ESO Publication Statistics.