To keep ALMA at the forefront of technology, ESO collaborates closely with the member state institutes, who are invited to submit proposals for development studies through a call for proposals issued by the contracts and procurements department. The evaluation of the latest call has now been completed and seven new agreements have been signed. Five of these studies are directly supporting the ALMA wideband sensitivity upgrade (WSU), an ambitious project to increase ALMA's instantaneous bandwidth by up to four times. The two remaining studies are working to bring advanced data products for ALMA and exploring the science cases for focal plane arrays on ALMA.

The call for abstracts and registration page of the workshop ‘New Heights in Planet Formation’ will open on 1^st March. The deadline for the submission of abstracts is the 31^st March 2024. Please note that ESO has a limited budget to support early career participants without funding.

ESO is pleased to announce the conference “Hey GPT! Can you help me understand the Universe?” from 23 to 27 September 2024. The conference will be held fully online (as a Zoom meeting and broadcast live on YouTube). It is anticipated the live programme to start around 2 pm CEST and finish around 6 pm CEST. The conference, aimed primarily at astronomers, will focus on the impact of generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) and large language models (LLM), such as the generative pre-trained transformer (GPT) languages, on science and mostly on astronomy.

With the release of the La Silla Paranal telescope schedule, the Phase 2 preparation for runs scheduled in Service Mode begins. The deadline for the submission of the Phase 2 material for Period 113 is Thursday, 22 February 2024.  

The 113^th Observing Programmes Committee (OPC) met online during November 2023. Based on the committee's recommendations to the ESO Director General, a total of 1059 (10-hour equivalent) nights of (Designated) Visitor Mode and Service Mode observations were allocated on the VLT/VLTI, the 3.6-metre, and NTT telescopes. The schedule timeline and the list of scheduled runs is publicly available.

This is the first announcement of the ESO workshop "A decade of discoveries with MUSE and beyond", to be held at ESO-Garching between 18 and 22 November 2024.

After a 10,000 km journey across the world, the first mirror segments of ESO’s Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) have safely arrived at the ELT Technical Facility at ESO’s Paranal Observatory in the Chilean Atacama Desert. A total of 18 segments (out of 798) of the telescope’s main mirror (M1) successfully made the trip from Europe to South America.

Dear colleagues

There is no doubt that 2023 has been a year with amazing progress at ESO, full of achievements and ending with a very positive forward look. We did have our fair share of difficulties, but it is undeniable that thanks to the commitment of our staff, the engagement with the community and the support from our Member States, many successes were achieved.

ESO is currently advertising the position of the La Silla Paranal Observatory Director. The La Silla Paranal Observatory (LPO) provides and operates some of the world's largest and most advanced observational facilities at three sites in Northern Chile. La Silla hosts the 3.6-m telescope, the New Technology Telescope (NTT), and a number of hosted telescope projects. Cerro Paranal is the home of the Very Large Telescope, the VLT, the VLT Interferometer (VLTI), the VISTA survey telescope, and several Hosted Telescope projects. Paranal Observatory will further be responsible for the operation of the ELT at Cerro Armazones and the southern array of the Cherenkov Telescope Array Observatory (CTAO). APEX, the Atacama Pathfinder Experiment, is a hosted sub-mm telescope project located on the high-altitude site of Llano Chajnantor. The LPO division further works in close collaboration with the Data Management and Operations (DMO) division which is responsible for the off-site operations and user support of LPO in the framework of an integrated end-to-end system, maintaining the archive facility and its data holdings as a powerful resource, both scientific and operational. The LPO Director is a Division Head at ESO and reports to the Director of Operations.

After the great success of the program in the last five editions, ESO is delighted to announce that the call for applications for the 6th ESO Summer Research Programme is now open. This fully-funded program is available to students in STEM fields who have not yet started a Ph.D. program and have completed at least two years of their degree.