The Call for Proposals for the La Silla Paranal Observatory will move to a yearly cycle in 2025. To address the increased duty cycle resulting from this change, a Fast Track Channel with staggered deadlines throughout the year will be introduced simultaneously. The criteria and frequency for the Fast Track Channel are under discussion with the ESO advisory committees (Scientific and Technical Committee and Users Committee). The community will be informed regularly about the implementation of the yearly call and the Fast Track Channel through news in the upcoming Call for Proposals for Period 115, newsletter posts and direct emails to active Principal Investigators. The change follows recommendations made in a report by the Time Allocation Working Group almost a decade ago.

This is the second announcement of the conference “Hey GPT! Can you help me understand the Universe? A synoptic view of the impact of chatGPT-like technologies on the future of astronomy”. The list of invited speakers, including the title of their talks, can be found at the workshop webpage.

Going well beyond the 10th anniversary of MUSE, this workshop is a very timely opportunity to reflect on the many successes and challenges such an instrument triggered and to further shape a community-wide science perspective and effort, supported by integral-field spectroscopy. Please note that the registration and abstract submission for the ESO workshop "A decade of discoveries with MUSE and beyond" are now open.

ESO is excited to announce that registration and abstract submission for the ESO conference "Galaxies at Crossroads: Outflows and IMF in the VLT/ELT/ALMA/JWST Era" (GALCROSS) are now open. The conference will be held in Brno, Czech Republic, from 16-20 September 2024. The conference will explore the dynamic processes shaping galaxies, particularly gas outflows, and critically examine important factors like the Initial Mass Function (IMF), ultimately analyzing their reciprocal influence on the chemical enrichment of both stellar and gas components. This event is a unique opportunity to merge theoretical insights and observational breakthroughs, sparked by the latest data from cutting-edge astronomical instruments. The focus is on dissecting the complex interplay between galactic outflows/inflows, the Initial Mass Function (IMF), and the intricate mass-metallicity relationship, all of which are key to understanding the cosmic tapestry of galaxy formation and evolution.

The latest edition of ESO's science and technology journal, The Messenger, is now available online.

The release of the MUSE gAlaxy Groups In COSMOS (MAGIC) survey (Programmes 094.A-0247, 095.A-0118, 096.A-0596, 097.A-0254, 098.A-0017, 099.A-0246, 0100.A-0607, 0101.A-0282, 0102.A-0327, 0103.A-0563, PI T. Contini) is composed of 18 datacubes, observed with exposure times from 1 to 10 hours, with a median of 4.3 hours, using the wide-field mode, with a spectral sampling of 1.25 Angstroms and a spatial sampling of 0.2 arcsecond. The datacubes cover the wavelength range between 4700 and 9350 Angstroms and have an image quality better than 0.7" FWHM owing to good observing conditions and/or to the use of adaptive optics. The median 3-sigma point-source flux limit of an unresolved emission line reaches 3.6x10^-19 erg s^-1 cm^-2 and the median point source magnitude limit is about 28.5 at 5-sigma in white-light images. The MAGIC survey datacubes target 15 known massive groups and clusters at intermediate redshift (0.3 < z < 0.8), 14 of which being located in the COSMOS field and one in the VVDS field. This dataset is incredibly rich and contains more than one thousand of objects, from stars to high redshift galaxies, as well as extended nebulae.

The  Enhanced Resolution Imager and Spectrograph (ERIS) is a general-use infrared integral field spectrograph and imager that utilises the adaptive optics on the VLT’s UT4. After one year of operation, the proprietary period for the first observations has expired. Both raw and fully processed science data are now publicly available for download via the ESO Archive. The processed data are organised into two data collections, ERIS-NIX and ERIS-SPIFFIER, which contain reduced scientific imaging products and 3D data cubes, respectively. 

The European Interferometry Initiative (Eii) is an open association of institutes and laboratories willing to collaborate in exploiting and developing long-baseline optical interferometry in optical/infrared astronomy, with the VLT interferometer as its leading facility. To continuously promote excellence in the field, the European Interferometry Initiative is happy to invite nominations for the EII Early Career Prize. The newly created prize will be awarded every two years (even years starting from 2024) by the EII Scientific Council to a young scientist (within four years after their PhD) who distinguished themselves for using optical-infrared long-baseline interferometry.

GRAVITY has transformed optical interferometry thanks to its unprecedented sensitivity. GRAVITY+ will yet improve VLTI sensitivity by being able to observe targets as faint as K<22 mag. This will allow significant breakthroughs across astrophysical domains as different as AGNs, young stellar objects and exoplanets. Thanks to the sensitivity boost provided by GRAVITY+ this is the time to open VLTI to explore new fundamental physics by installing a new high-resolution grism for GRAVITY+. This workshop is aimed at the wider spectroscopic, and spectro-interferometric community to gather new ideas about how to maximise the scientific exploration of the new GRAVITY high resolution capabilities, and engage with the spectroscopic community with or without interferometric experience.

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 25 and 26 April 2024. 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 Large Programmes.