The gradual ramp-up of observing facilities at La Silla and Paranal continues, with FORS2, UVES, X-Shooter and MUSE (no-AO) being in operation on Paranal, and EFOSC2 and HARPS in operation on La Silla.  It is planned to add most of the remaining telescope and instrument systems by the end of the year, including the Adaptive Optics Facility at UT4 and the VLTI. The current status of the systems in operations can be consulted here.

ALMA started the ‘Operation Support Facility (OSF) Ramp-up phase’ on 21 October. During this phase, the focus of the recovery is on returning to normal services at the OSF, including food service, opening of labs and offices, and the confirmation of the stability of critical services.

The second data release from the Fornax Deep Survey with VST projects is now available on the ESO archive and it is accessible to the community via the Science Portal, programmatically, and via the Catalogue Query Interface. This data release follows the publication of the refereed paper by Cantiello et al. (2020).

Following the ongoing ramp-up to minimal science operations at Paranal, La Silla and APEX, observations with MUSE have resumed, and the instrument is now available for Director's Discretionary Time proposals.

The Space Telescope Science Institute, Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian, the Johns Hopkins University, European Southern Observatory, and Associated Universities, Inc. organized a Memorial Symposium to celebrate the life and work of our late friend and colleague Riccardo Giacconi. The Symposium was held in Washington, DC at the National Academy of Sciences on 29-30 May 2019. Presentations from the Symposium are now posted.

ESO is organising a virtual guided tour of the ESO sites to facilitate the interaction between recent ESO students in Chile and Germany and candidates interested in applying to the currently open programme. If you are considering applying for a studentship, ESO invites you to attend the tour on 5 November 2020, 14:00 CEST/10:00 CLT to discover the sites and learn more about the life of students at ESO, tips for your application or ask any other questions you might have. 

Due to the implications of the global pandemic and the suspension of science operations at the Paranal observatory since the end of March, ESO has postponed the end of VIRCAM operations, which were originally expected to take place until the end of Period 107 (30 September 2021). VIRCAM operations are now planned to go on until the end of Period 108 (31 March 2022). This extension should allow the completion of the remaining ongoing ESO Public Surveys, as well as Large Programmes approved by the OPC in previous periods.

As part of ESO’s efforts to offer science data products to its community via the ESO Science Archive Facility, all the spectroscopic data acquired since the beginning of UVES operations at the VLT from March 2000 to March 2020, i.e. 20 years, have been reprocessed. Whenever possible, 1D spectra have been stacked at the OB level. The master calibrations associated with the science data before March 2015 have been reprocessed for better quality and consistency. Due to this reprocessing, some of the early science products not available before are now provided. All 1D spectra products are available from the ESO archive, have quality control plots and associated 2D extracted spectral images.

Following the ramp-up to minimal science operations started on 9 September at Paranal and APEX (see separate announcement), observations with X-SHOOTER at UT3 have also recently resumed, and the instrument is now available for Director's Discretionary Time proposals.

A new version of the VVV VISTA Public Survey source catalog is now available from the ESO Archive. The imaging data in the ZYJHKs bands from which the source catalogue is extracted are acquired under ESO programme 179.B-2002 before the 26th of September 2015.