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 user interfaces to the La Silla Paranal Observatory and ALMA. The annual meeting of the UC is scheduled on 28 and 29 April 2022. 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 future of Visitor Mode and remote participation in observations. The UC welcomes input, opinions and suggestions from the community either through direct contact with the UC members or through the Poll designed by the UC.

VISIONS (programme id 198.C-2009, PI J. Alves) is a Near-Infrared ESO second cycle VISTA Public Survey which covers all major nearby star-forming regions accessible from the southern hemisphere. This imaging survey is designed to deliver deep high-sensitivity observations of areas with large amounts of extinction. It includes also control fields which sample the predominant stellar populations in largely extinction-free regions and multiple epochs imaging data over large areas surrounding the targeted star-forming regions to enable the computation of proper motions for sources inaccessible to Gaia.

ANDES is the new name for the high-resolution spectrograph, formerly known as HIRES, for the Extremely Large Telescope (ELT). Another instrument dubbed HIRES is successfully operating on the Keck telescope, so it was decided to rename the ELT spectrograph. Through an open process, the consortium — in consultation with the ESO follow-up team — has decided on "ArmazoNes high Dispersion Echelle Spectrograph", or ANDES. The official start of both ANDES and MOSAIC as two more ELT instrument projects was approved by the ESO Council in December last year.

The Solar System Science with the ELTs conference will focus on ESO’s ELT unique capabilities to address the open questions in the diverse subfields of Solar System science. Special emphasis will be put on how the ELT, alongside with the GMT and TMT, will fit in the rich landscape of ground- and space-based telescopes, in particular with the current and future ESA missions.

The Call for Proposals for observations at ESO telescopes in Period 110 (1 October 2022 - 31 March 2023) has been released. Please consult the Period 110 document for the main news items and policies related to applying for time on ESO telescopes. All technical information about the offered instruments and facilities is contained on ESO webpages that are linked from the Call. The proposal submission deadline is 12:00 CET 25 March 2022.

The P110 Call for Proposal is open and ESO is offering a short session on the latest information users need to write proposals for La Silla, Paranal, and APEX. This session will happen on Friday, March 11th at 12 CET on Teams.

As announced in the P110 call for proposals, ESO will no longer offer APEX observing time beyond Period 110. The last opportunity to submit ESO observing proposals for APEX is thus the P110 deadline on 25 March 2022, for observations in the second half of 2022. This corresponds to the end of the current APEX agreement. From 2023 to 2025, ESO will operate APEX as a hosted telescope on a cost neutral basis, but without observing time to the ESO community. Data from the remaining APEX partners taken after 2022 will also no longer be stored in the ESO archive.

Last year proved to be a record-breaking year for research based on observations conducted at ESO observatories. A recent report by the ESO Library and Information Centre shows that, in 2021 alone, over 1100 papers including ESO data were released, the highest annual number of publications from ESO telescope data to date.

The European ALMA Regional Centre invites European ALMA users to a virtual community assembly on March 25 at 11:00 CET, in connection with the Cycle 9 call for proposals. At this meeting, updates will be provided on the current and upcoming observing cycles and on the support from the European ARC network. In the dedicated Q&A session you will have the opportunity to ask your questions. The meeting can be accessed at this link.

Also in 2022, as in previous years, ALMA is in shut-down mode during the month of February. This period is used for maintenance purposes and operations are expected to restart in March 2022. More information about the configuration schedule can be found on the ALMA Science Portal.