The deadline for proposal submission for Period 114 (1 October 2024 - 31 March 2025) was 21 March 2024: 859 valid proposals were submitted, of which 29 are Large Programmes. On the VLT, the most demanded ESO instrument was MUSE with a request of 407 nights, followed by ESPRESSO with 249 nights. Probably due to the increasing popularity of ESPRESSO, the pressure on UVES has now reduced to 193 nights. The demand on the still new instrument ERIS keeps increasing, and is now 159 nights. HARPS/NIRPS on the ESO 3.6-metre telescope was the most demanded instrument at La Silla, with a combined request of 239 nights.
ESO Period 114 Proposal Submission Statistics
Published: 01 Apr 2024
In Paranal, the telescope with the highest oversubscription is Yepun (UT4), with a total request of 656 nights, followed by Melipal (UT3) with 486 nights. As in the previous periods, 90% of programmes requested Service Mode at the VLT.
ESO continues to offer the VLT/I-ALMA joint programmes with a stable request of a few programmes per semester.
The distributed peer review (DPR) in P114 followed the setup introduced in P110. Thus the DPR channel processes proposals requesting a total telescope time of 16 hours or less, and will evaluate around 50% of all submitted proposals, covering around 13% of all the requested time. The rest of the proposals will be reviewed by the Observing Programmes Committee.
The percentages of submitted proposals across science categories were:
- Cosmology and Intergalactic Medium 12%
- Galaxies 25%
- Interstellar Medium, Star Formation, and Planetary Systems 34%
- Stellar Evolution 30%
Proposals will be reviewed by the expert panels or in the DPR scheme, under the oversight of the Observing Programmes Committee. Proposers can expect to be informed of the outcome of the review process in early July 2024.