The Opticon Radionet Pilot (ORP) funding remains available till the end of 2024 for travel to one of the European ALMA Regional Centre nodes in Europe, for ALMA users who need face-to-face support for their ALMA projects. Users wishing to apply for ORP funding should fill out the form in addition to submitting a Helpdesk ticket that is required to arrange the ARC node visit. Face-to-face visits to ARC nodes can be arranged for assistance with data calibration and analysis, proposal preparation, and archive research projects.

A detailed report of the Cycle 11 Proposal Submission Statistics is now available. The report provides a summary of items such as the number of submitted proposals and time requested, subscription rates, and comparisons with the number of hours requested in previous Cycles. The report can be downloaded as a pdf document.

A new ALMA development study to automatically extract spectral line sources from ALMA data cubes and derive advanced data products from them had its kick-off meeting on 3 June 2024 in Gothenburg (Sweden). This new study, led by the Onsala Space Observatory (OSO, Chalmers University, Sweden), will start by examining how to optimize the Source Finding Application (SoFiA) software to extract emission lines from ALMA data cubes. The identified line emitting sources will then be run through the SoFiA Imaging Pipeline (SIP) to produce publication-quality advanced data products such as moment 0, 1 and 2 maps, position-velocity diagrams and extracted spectra. In the next stages, the study will investigate how to perform automated line identification, based on redshift information available in the archive. This can be used to improve the derivation of source properties in the advanced data products. The study aims to serve a broad range of science topics and to be able to be run on calibrated ALMA data cubes in the archive from previous Cycles. The ultimate goal is to enhance the scientific accessibility of spectral line data products for a wide range of scientific applications.

UltraVISTA is an ultra-deep near-infrared survey of the central region of the COSMOS field. A recent overview of UltraVISTA can be found in this presentation. The sixth and last UltraVISTA data release, "DR6" or "Legacy", comprises stacked images in YJHKs and NB118 narrow-band filters, as well as single-band and dual-mode source lists. The data release also contains a five-band merged catalogue, created from the individual Ks-selected source lists. The release is based on the observations carried out from December 2009 to March 2023, corresponding to 99,845 individual images. The observations obtained since the DR5 release are mostly in the Y-band "deep" stripes in order to bring them to the same depth as the previously observed "ultra-deep" stripes. Thus, in this release, the depth is nearly uniform over the full field for the broad-band YJHKs filters. This release also uses GTO data obtained in 2010 in the J and the NB118 filters in the "deep" stripes.

As previously announced, an open process to recruit an LPO Director was launched by ESO in late 2023. Thomas Klein, currently Deputy Director of the La Silla Paranal Observatory and Programme Manager of the Integrated Operations Programme, was selected following a competitive process. Thomas will begin his service as LPO Director on 1 August 2024, reporting to Andreas Kaufer, who will remain ESO Director of Operations.  

Following discussions with Council and the Scientific and Technical Committee during 2023, ESO is now merging the three instrumentation programmes that are in place for its optical/infrared telescopes: The Paranal Instrumentation Programme; the ELT instrumentation project, for the ELT construction instruments; and the Armazones Instrumentation Programme, for the future ELT instrumentation.

BlueMUSE is an optical seeing-limited, blue-optimised, medium spectral resolution, panoramic integral-field-spectrograph, to be installed at the VLT. With a wide wavelength coverage (350 - 580 nm), an average spectral resolution of R=4000 and a field-of-view of 1arcmin², BlueMUSE will offer new and unique science opportunities in many fields of astrophysics. ESO has approved the Phase A  (conceptual design) of the project led by PI Johan Richard from the Centre de Recherche Astrophysique de Lyon (France), the laboratory leading the consortium composed of a total of 9 institutes world-wide. The expected first-light for the BlueMUSE instrument is 2031.

Gas flowing into, out of, and around galaxies plays a key role in shaping how their properties evolve over cosmic time. The mechanisms driving these behaviors are poorly understood, largely because we lack detailed knowledge of fundamental gas properties across multiple scales and phases. Tackling these issues necessarily requires a multi-wavelength approach. Fortunately, the southern hemisphere hosts the most comprehensive suite of observational facilities available for tackling this topic, in the form of the ESO, ALMA, the Square Kilometer Array (SKA) precursors (MWA, ASKAP and MeerKAT), and very soon, the SKA-Mid and SKA-Low telescopes. This conference, which will take place near Busselton Australia, from 9 to 13 December 2024, is sponsored by both ESO and the SKA as it supports the joint science of both facilities that will be dominant in astronomy in the coming decade.

On 5 June, ESO signed an agreement with an international consortium of institutions for the design and construction of ANDES, the ArmazoNes high Dispersion Echelle Spectrograph. The ANDES instrument will be installed on ESO’s Extremely Large Telescope (ELT). It will be used to search for signs of life in exoplanets and look for the very first stars, as well as to test variations of the fundamental constants of physics and measure the acceleration of the Universe’s expansion.

Following a recommendation by the ESO Scientific and Technical Committee (STC), ESO is issuing a call for letters of intent for public surveys with KMOS. A public survey is understood to be an observing programme in which the investigators commit to produce and make publicly available, within a defined time, a fully reduced and scientifically usable data set that is likely to answer a major scientific question and be of general use and of broad interest to the astronomical community. The raw data are public immediately. These surveys are envisaged to be observing programmes with up to 200 observing nights to be allocated over six semesters with KMOS.