ESO, Santiago, Chile, 5–9 March 2018

This one-week workshop is the third edition of the Observing Planetary Systems workshop (OPS-III) held every 5 years at ESO-Chile, which aims to bring together  Solar System and exoplanet scientific communities. The discovery of exoplanetary systems with a large variety of architectures can teach us about the formation and history of our own Solar System, and the deep understanding of our own environment can help us search for traces of life outside of the Solar System.  

VANDELS is a deep Public Spectroscopic Survey of high-redshift galaxies with the VIMOS spectrograph. It is designed to exploit the multi-wavelength imaging and near-IR grism spectroscopy available in the CANDELS UDS and CDFS fields. The goal is to obtain spectra with sufficient signal-to-noise ratio to derive metallicities and velocity offsets from absorption and emission lines, allowing a detailed investigation of the physics of galaxies in the early Universe. Within an area of 0.2 deg², the survey will deliver more than 2500 high (15-20) signal-to-noise spectra of star forming galaxies in the redshift range 2.5 < z< 5.5, passive galaxies with H< 22.5 at 1.5 < z < 2.5, and star forming galaxies at 3.0 < z < 7.0 with H < 27, in the AB magnitude system.

This third data release from the VISTA Kilo-degree Infrared Galaxy Public Survey VIKING of images, source lists and a catalogue covers all of the highest quality data (images and single-band source lists) taken from November 2009 to March 2015. The release contains 736 VISTA images, of which 662 have coverage in all five VIKING near-infrared filters, 647 with deep co-adds in J, and an additional 74 with at least two filters. These 736 fields cover a total area of 1104 square degrees.

The Call for Proposals for observations at ESO telescopes in Period 101 (1 April 2018 – 30 September 2018) has been released. Please consult the Period 101 document for the main news items and policies related to applying for time on ESO telescopes. All technical information about the offered instruments and facilities is contained on ESO webpages that are linked from the Call. The proposal submission deadline is 12:00 CEST 28 September 2017.

Astronomers applying for time in Period 101 should note that the Observing Programmes Committee (OPC) scientific subcategories belonging to Categories A and B have been redefined. In addition, Category A is now called "Cosmology and the Intergalactic Medium" (previously "Cosmology") while Category B has been renamed "Galaxies" from "Galaxies and Galactic Nuclei". The full updated list of A and B subcategories is available on the OPC Categories page and in the ESOFORM User Manual.

ESO’s prominent postdoctoral fellowship programme in both Garching (Germany) and Santiago (Chile) offers outstanding early-career scientists the opportunity to further develop their independent research programmes. From exoplanets to cosmology, observational, theoretical and fundamental astrophysics, these are all areas where ESO Fellows can benefit from a highly dynamic scientific environment, at some of the most advanced ground-based telescopes in the world.

The ESO Engineering and Technology Research Fellowship 2018 offers early-career researchers with a PhD degree in an engineering-related discipline, or in physics / astronomy with a strong technology content, the opportunity to take an active part in the very active ESO R&D projects for a minimum of 50% of their time, combined with a good deal of team spirit, curiosity and eagerness to learn.

Santiago and La Silla Observatory, Chile, 18 February – 2 March 2018

The ESO/NEON School is preferentially targeted to PhD students, advanced MSc's and early PostDocs. During two weeks of intense work the participants will have the chance to have hands-on experience of the full cycle from proposal preparation to data reduction. Students will have lectures on the basics of observing techniques and how to prepare observations for ESO telescopes in Santiago, and then go to the La Silla Observatory for three nights of observations with the NTT and Danish 1.54-metre telescopes. Full details on the School website.

Technical losses from VLT Visitor Mode observations have been analysed over four Periods (P95 – P98) and are reported here in response to a request from the Users Committee. The technical losses in Visitor Mode, and for global Service Mode and Visitor Mode in parenthesis are as follows on the VLT: UT1: 2.2% (3.4%), UT2: 2.5% (3.1%), UT3: 3.4% (4.6%), UT4: 1.2% (3.9%); on VLTI: 3.8% (7.9%).

1D spectra for telluric standard stars from the beginning of X-shooter operations in October 2009 until the present are now available as stand-alone science-grade spectra. About 30000 new 1D spectra have been added to the X-shooter data collection for a list of 1000 target stars; these numbers will grow as new spectra are added.