VIDEO is a deep near-infrared survey which targets ~12 square degrees over the ELAIS-S1, XMMLSS, and ECDFS extragalactic fields, and is one of the six VISTA Public Surveys. There are two new data releases from VIDEO: for CDFS (VIDEO-CDFS DR2) and ELAIS-S1 (VIDEO-ES1 DR2).

Scisoft is a project within ESO to provide a collection of astronomical software utilities in a uniform way at all ESO sites, and to make them available to the worldwide community. It was developed by ESO to run on Linux computers and primarily for internal use, but the collection is also freely distributed externally.

The term "Phase 3" was coined to denote the process whereby users are able to return science data products to ESO in order to make them available to the community at large through the Science Archive Facility. The upgrade of the Phase 3 system has now doubled the available storage space, allowing upload of more new science data products via Phase 3. In addition the underlying architecture has been improved in terms of performance, with the goal to ingest and make new data available in a shorter time than was possible before.

The ESO research studentship programme provides an outstanding opportunity for Ph.D. students to experience the exciting scientific environment, at one of the world's leading observatories, for a period of up to two years.

The EIROforum School of Instrumentation (ESI) is a biennial event, jointly organised by the Instrumentation Working Group of the EIROforum organisations. The fourth school (ESI 2015) will be held at ESO and EUROfusion in Garching, Germany from 15-19 June 2015.

The VISTA Variables in the Via Lactea Survey (VVV) is a wide area, near-infrared (Z, Y, J, H, Ks), multi-epoch imaging survey of the Milky Way Bulge and Disk with a total sky coverage of 540 square degrees. This new Phase 3 release (VVV DR4) contains observations up to 30 September 2013 with all approved data from CASU v1.3 pipeline reduction, and includes images and single-band source catalogues. It replaces the previous releases that had been processed with previous pipeline versions and adds a large amount of new data, mainly increasing the number of epochs for the Ks band.

The Call for Proposals for observations at ESO telescopes in Period 96 (1 October 2015 – 31 March 2016) has been released. Please consult the Call for Proposals 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 deadline for proposals is 12:00 CET 26 March 2015.

The ESO research studentship programme provides an outstanding opportunity for Ph.D. students to experience the exciting scientific environment, at one of the world's leading observatories, for a period of up to two years. Studentship positions are open to students enrolled in a university Ph.D. programme in astronomy or related fields and work under the formal supervision of their home university but, for a period of between one and two years, they study at ESO under the co-supervision of an ESO staff astronomer.
The deadline for ESO Studentship applications has been moved to 01 May. Details will be provided in March.

The Swedish-ESO PI receiver for APEX (SEPIA) is a new instrument that is currently being commissioned. It will initially host an ALMA Band 5 receiver covering 159 to 211 GHz in dual-polarization, sideband-separating bands of 4 GHz width. SEPIA is offered for regular proposals in Period 96 (see the Call for Proposals), but ESO also invites the community to submit short Science Verification proposals with a deadline of 18 March 2015. Please find further details here.

The User Support Department (USD) invites principal investigators and their Phase 2 delegates to participate in the most recent user feedback campaign. The survey is designed to provide USD with the opinions of the science community on a number of services. As such it is an important way for the department to know where we are doing well, and where there is room for improvement.