The zCOSMOS redshift survey has been designed to efficiently utilize VIMOS by splitting the survey into two parts. The first, zCOSMOS-bright, aims to produce a redshift survey of approximately 20,000 I-band selected galaxies at redshifts z < 1.2. Covering the approximately 1.7 deg² of the COSMOS field (essentially the full ACS-covered area), the transverse dimension at z ~ 1 is 75 Mpc. The second part, zCOSMOS-deep, will observe about 10,000 galaxies selected through well-defined colour selection criteria which mostly lie at 1.5 < z < 3.0. Simply to keep the required amount of telescope time manageable, the field of zCOSMOS-deep is restricted to the central 1 deg² of the COSMOS field.

The Science Demonstration (SD) of MAD is carried out largely following the philosophy applied to the Science Verification of the VLT instruments. MAD SD runs took place in November 2007 (SD1), January 2008 (SD2) and August 2008 (SD3).

AMBER, the near-infrared/red focal instrument of the VLTI, operates in the bands J, H, and, K (ie 1.0 to 2.4 μm). The instrument has been designed to be used with two or three beams, thus enabling also the use of closure phase techniques. The magnitude limits of AMBER are K=7 with Low Resolution (LR-HK) on UTs and K=5 on the ATs, K=4 with Medium Resolution K-band (MR-K) on the UTs and K=1.6 on the ATs, and K=1.5 with High Resolution K-band (HR-K) on UTs.

HAWK-I is a cryogenic wide-field imager installed at the Nasmyth A focus of UT4. The on-sky field of view is 7.5'x7.5', with a cross-shaped gap of 15" between the four HAWAII 2RG 2048x2048 pixels detectors. The pixel scale is of 0.106". The instrument is offered with 10 observing filters placed in two filter wheels: 4 broad band filters (Y(Z), J, H & K) and 6 narrow band filters (Bracket gamma, CH4, H2, 1.061 μm, 1.187 μm & 2.090 μm).

The Science Verification observations of the APEX Swedish Heterodyne Facility Instrument (SHFI) were observed in March 2008. ESO requested input from the community by issuing a call for SV projects in February 2008, with 39 proposals received. A selection of the APEX-1 proposals listed below have been observed during the week of joint SV observations in March 2008. The APEX-3 and APEX-T2 SV projects will be observed later in dynamical scheduling. ESO will also continue observing APEX-1 proposals during period 81.

This new query form provides the users with a unified access to the ESO collection of both imaging and spectroscopic Advanced Data Products (ADP).

The Commissioning of the VLTI RMN recorder took place in January 2008 using a configuration involving two ATs and Finito in Fringe tracking mode. The raw data now are available in the ESO archive. Data can be downloaded in one package or file-by-file.

Within the framework of AIDA (Astronomical Infrastructure for Data Access), the European Virtual Observatory (EURO-VO) project is seeking proposals from teams carrying out archival research or projects that could benefit from the Virtual Observatory concept. The Virtual Observatory tools and applications allow seamless access to most of the world's large data archives such as ESO, ESA or HST. They also allow users to access a huge variety of reduced multiwavelength data and catalogues and to perform high-level analysis of images, spectra and large tabular datasets. Successful applicants will receive support from EURO-VO astronomers in using the VO facilities and software to complete their projects.

As of 1st April 2008, PIs can access their own raw proprietary data at any time through the ESO archive.

As part of the ESO Deep Public Survey (DPS), optical imaging observations were carried out in U, B, V, R, I bands, using the Wide Field Imager (WFI) instrument mounted at the 2.2m telescope at La Silla, Chile. This survey consisted of three square degrees in three well-separated regions (Deep1, Deep2 and Deep3) split into 4 adjacent WFI pointings (named a, b, c, d). The Garching-Bonn Deep Survey (GaBoDS) combines the data from this survey with data from most other ESO programmes that coincide with the original DPS regions, up until December 2006.