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.

In its efforts to promote the scientific exchange among astronomers, the Directorate for Science at ESO continues to provide support and funding for the organisation of scientific workshops in Santiago and in Garching as well as co-funding for some external workshops. Science workshops are an essential component of ESO's programmes and represent a unique opportunity to promote and foster ideas and collaborations within the scientific community.

The Users Committee (UC) represents ESO's astronomical community at large and acts as an advisory body to the ESO Director General on matters related to the performance, scientific access, operation and data management facilities to the La Silla Paranal Observatory and ALMA. The annual meeting of the UC is scheduled on 28 and 29 April 2025. During the UC meeting updates from ESO and feedback from the user community are exchanged and openly discussed. Each year one topic is explored in more detail and this year the Special Topic session is dedicated to Quality Assurance and Data Quality.

The Call for Proposals for observations at ESO telescopes in Period 116 (1 October 2025 - 30 April 2026) has been released. Please consult the Period 116 document before applying for time on ESO telescopes. All technical information about the offered instruments and facilities can be found on the ESO webpages linked from the Call for Proposals. The proposal submission deadline is on 20 March 2025, 12:00 CEST.

ESO is pleased to announce the first ESO Science Writing School, which will take place on 4-8 August 2025, at the ESO headquarters in Garching, Germany.  

Are you a PhD student eager to dive into the cutting-edge scientific world at one of the most prestigious observatories on the planet? The ESO research studentship programme offers you a chance to do just that. This exceptional programme is open to students enrolled in a PhD programme in astronomy or related fields. You will continue your doctoral research under the formal supervision of your home university, but with the added benefit of spending a minimum of six months (Chile) or one year (Germany), and up to two years at ESO, working closely with a dedicated ESO staff astronomer.