With the release of the telescope schedule, the preparation of Service Mode (SM) observations (Phase 2) starts. The deadline for the submission of the Phase 2 material for Period 108 observations is 12 August 2021.

The 108^th Observing Programmes Committee (OPC) met online during May and June 2021. Based on the committee's recommendations to the ESO Director General, a total of 2419 (8-hour equivalent) nights of Designated Visitor Mode and Service Mode observations were allocated on the VLT/VLTI, VISTA, VST, the 3.6-metre and NTT, and APEX telescopes. The submission deadline for Phase 2 Service Mode observations is Thursday 12 August, 2021; see the separate announcement for further details.

Members of ESO's community occasionally propose projects to a national or international funding agency, where an ESO site or facility is the intended host.  Some of the telescopes at ESO sites, particularly on Cerro La Silla, are successful examples of this approach. Some visiting instruments for existing telescopes and enhancements to facility instruments have also been known to follow this approach. ESO kindly requests that prospective applicants contact the ESO Director for Science at least 3 months before submission to the funding source.  Implementation cannot be guaranteed if funding for such projects is obtained without a green light from ESO.

The AMBRE collaboration between the Observatoire de la Côte d'Azur (OCA, Nice) and ESO has the goal to analyse the wealth of stellar spectroscopic data in the ESO science archive using the MATISSE parametrisation algorithm to derive stellar atmospheric parameters (Recio-Blanco et al., 2006, Worley et al. 2012, de Laverny et al. 2012, De Pascale et al. 2014. This data release provides stellar radial velocity, effective temperature, surface gravity, mean metallicity and enrichment in alpha-elements for about 4480 distinct stellar objects observed between October 2003 and October 2010 using HARPS (378 nm – 691 nm). More information can be found in the related release documentation.

ESO observatories operated under challenging conditions in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, having to reduce and even pause scientific observations for a few months. Nonetheless, 2020 was still a very productive year with regard to the number of papers that were published using data from ESO telescopes, mostly obtained in previous years. A recently published report from the ESO library shows that 2020 represents the fourth consecutive year that over 1000 scientific studies using ESO data were published. The majority of these publications used data from ESO’s flagship facility, the Very Large Telescope (VLT), and the VLT Interferometer (VLTI). 

Preparations are being put in place to resume construction work on ESO’s Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) at Cerro Armazones in Chile, following disruption due to the COVID-19 pandemic, which forced the closure of the site in mid-2020. As work on manufacturing and design elements of the ELT in Europe progressed steadily, the evolution of this complex and ambitious project, set to revolutionise modern astronomy, has been closely monitored over the past year. ESO’s ELT is now expected to deliver the first scientific observations in September 2027, about half a year after an initial “telescope technical first light”.

ESO is pleased to announce the conference Atmospheres, Atmospheres! Do I look like I care about atmospheres? that will take place online from 23 to 27 August 2021. This conference will bring together the community working theoretically and observationally on understanding exoplanet atmospheres by transmission and emission spectroscopy, with an emphasis on using ground-based facilities. It aims also to bring together those working on the atmospheres of close-in exoplanets and those studying the atmospheres of giant planets in our Solar System, in order to compare methodologies and see where synergies exist or could be made.

The CRyogenic high-resolution InfraRed Echelle Spectrograph (CRIRES) has been upgraded to a cross-dispersed high-resolution infrared spectrograph. The upgraded CRIRES is now offered to the community for Science Verification (SV) for three or four nights in September 2021. All astronomers are invited to participate in this opportunity to obtain unique science with the upgraded CRIRES and thus to demonstrate its scientific capabilities. ESO encourages the community to submit highly challenging or risky science observations that will push CRIRES to its limits in order to better understand the performance parameter space and its envelope.

The latest edition of ESO's quarterly journal, The Messenger, is now available online. In this Issue 183 our readers will find a summary of ESO’s Strategy for the 2020s, learn about the prospects for future exoplanet imaging based on high-precision astrometric studies with VLT/SPHERE, as well as explore the low-surface brightness regime of galaxies thanks to the VST Early-type GAlaxy Survey (VEGAS).

Over the past several weeks, ALMA has continued to conduct PI science observations on a best-effort basis while the recovery of the Arrays has been ongoing. The first set of antenna relocations was completed on May 10, 2021, moving the 12-m Array into the C43-6 configuration. In addition, PI science using eight antennas on the 7-m Array began on May 18, 2021. The plan is to go through all remaining configurations (C43-7 to C43-10) by the end of Cycle 7, although for a shorter duration than originally planned for each configuration.