The Offices for Science and the Astronomy Faculty are very pleased to present the 2021 ESO Fellows. Here is an introduction to the Fellows due to start in Germany and Chile later this year.

The 4th Azores School on Observational Cosmology will take place in Angra do Heroísmo (Terceira Island, Portugal) from 6 to 12 September 2021. The school is jointly organized by CAUP/IA, ESO and University of Azores, and the topic for this edition will be 'Fundamental cosmology from the ELT and space'. Should the COVID-19 situation make an in-person school impossible in September, the school will be online.

A new release of the Public ESO Spectroscopic Survey for Transient Objects (PESSTO) is available, including spectra and images from its ePESSTO extension, and the delivery of a new transient catalogue, globally covering 7 years of observations, from April 2012 to April 2019, for a total of 45 GB. This new release brings to 2323 the number of observed supernovae and optical transients, with calibrated 1D spectra for 2314 of them, doubling the number of objects previously published (1168 in the previous version).   

Astronet is a consortium of European funding agencies, established for the purpose of providing advice on long-term planning and development of European Astronomy. Astronet is now developing a new Science Vision & Infrastructure Roadmap with an outlook for the next 20 years. A delivery date to European funding agencies of mid-2021 is anticipated. After some delays due to the global pandemic, the first drafts of the chapters for the document are now available from the Panels asked to draft them, and input by the Eurpean astronomy and space science community as possible is very welcome.   

The INSPIRE project is an ESO Large Programme (ID: 1104.B- 0370, PI: C. Spiniello) which uses X-Shooter (in UVB, VIS, NIR band) to spectroscopically follow up 52 red ultra Compact Massive Galaxies selected from the KiDS VST ESO Public Survey. The goals of INSPIRE (Spiniello et al. 2021a, Spiniello et al. 2021b) are to obtain the first catalogue of spectroscopically confirmed relics in the redshift range 0.1<z<0.5, bridge the gap between the three local confirmed relics and the high-z red nuggets, and use the final statistic on confirmed relics to put a stringent constraint on the predictions from simulations on the initial burst of star formation in galaxies.

The VISTA EXtension to Auxiliary Surveys (VEXAS, Spiniello & Agnello, 2019, A&A, 630) project aims at building wide and spatially homogeneous multi-wavelength catalogues (from X- ray to radio) providing reference magnitudes, colors and morphological information for a large number of scientific uses. Currently the VEXAS catalogue is the widest and deepest public optical-to-IR photometric and spectroscopic database in the Southern Hemisphere, comprising more than 90 million objects with reliable photometry measured in at least one of the VISTA infrared bands, two of the WISE bands and three optical bands.

The Virtual OPTICON Archival School Using ESO and ALMA Data will take place on 19 - 26 June 2021. In this school  the students will do a project using data available either in the ESO or ALMA archive, lead by an experienced tutor who will guide the students in retrieving, reducing and analysing the data. This school is mainly meant for PhD students, but also MSc students in the later stages of their studies and young postdocs can be considered.

The Cube Analysis and Rendering Tool for Astronomy (CARTA), a new image visualisation and analysis tool designed for ALMA, VLA, and SKA pathfinders, has been integrated into the ALMA Science Archive (ASA). Now all 500,000+ science FITS files in the ALMA archive can be previewed using CARTA (Cycle 0 excluded).

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 27 and 28 April 2021. 

The installation of the upgraded CRIRES at the VLT, also known as CRIRES⁺, was completed in late February last year, with first light expected to happen shortly after. However, the COVID-19 pandemic forced the delay of the Commissioning for almost a year. With the ramping up of the Paranal Observatory in November 2020, the CRIRES instrument was reactivated on the 4^th of December 2020 and the commissioning activities took place starting on January 18^th, 2021 with 8 nights and February 18^th with 6 nights. Due to the deadline for the call for proposals only the results of Commissioning 1 could be included and the instrument is offered during Period 108 with a subset of modes.