The Astropy Project is running its first user survey! With over 50,000 users, 280,000 lines of code written by more than 450 contributors, and over 13,000 unique citations across its three papers, the Astropy Collaboration is made possible by hundreds of volunteer contributors worldwide. For more than a decade, ESO researchers have contributed direct and indirect development efforts to the core astropy package and critical packages in the Astropy ecosystem such as astroquery, advancing software tools for astronomy from the visible and infrared to the sub-mm. The first user survey is now being run to better understand how Astropy and its community of scientific software is being used, how it can be improved, and how it can best continue to support global astronomy and scientific research endeavors. Please take 15 minutes to give your input before 15 May and help us shape the future of astropy.

The Offices for Science are very pleased to present the 2025 ESO Fellows. Here is an introduction to the Fellows due to start in Garching and Chile later this year.

KiDS is an ESO Public Survey carried out with the VLT Survey Telescope and OmegaCAM camera, that has imaged 1347 square degrees in four filters (u, g, r, i). Single epoch observations are provided in u,g,r. Multi-epoch imaging is provided in the i-band, with the two observations, denoted i1 and i2, typically separated by several years. KiDS was designed as a weak lensing tomography survey, with a core science driver to map and constrain the properties of the evolving large-scale matter distribution in the Universe. The median r-band 5σ limiting magnitude is 24.8 with median seeing 0.7”. Additional science cases are manifold, ranging from galaxy evolution to Milky Way structure, and from the detection of white dwarfs to high-redshift quasars.

The VLT Survey Telescope (VST) at Paranal is now owned and managed by INAF which processes the data and releases them via the ESO Archive. The imaging data included in this DR1 are obtained using the wide-field camera OmegaCAM in the filters: u, g, r, i, z, H_α. They span a wide range of celestial objects, from distant galaxy clusters to nearby galaxies and star clusters.

Lunch session LS6 on "The ALMA 2030 Wideband Sensitivity Upgrade: status update" will take place on the 26th of June, during the European Astronomical Society (EAS) 2025 annual meeting in Cork (Ireland). The ALMA Wideband Sensitivity Upgrade (WSU for short) constitutes the top priority of the ALMA 2030 development roadmap.