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.

The FLAMES GIRAFFE spectrograph is not kept at a controlled temperature, and thus, at the beginning of every observing block, GIRAFFE is re-focussed to take account of collimator temperature. The best focus position depends on temperature, grating and wavelength setting. The FLAMES Instrument Operation Team discovered that the software coefficients used to set the focus of GIRAFFE have changed since commissioning – presumably because of aging effects in the optics – and have measured and updated these coefficients. The updated values lead to a substantial increase in spectral resolution and sensitivity across all settings, particularly for the high resolution (HR) settings.

The ESO Library develops and maintains two major information resources: the telescope bibliography (telbib), a database of refereed articles that use observational data from ESO facilities, and the library catalogue. In order to provide an optimal viewing experience from a large number of devices, the web interfaces of both tools have been adjusted using the Responsive Web Design (RWD) approach. This assures that users can search and navigate both sites from various screens, including desktop computers, tablets and smartphones, with minimal resizing and scrolling. Please try these resources from your favourite device.

The European ARC network is organising a series of community events in preparation for ALMA Cycle 3 (expected deadline 23 April 2015). The purpose of these events is to introduce the new ALMA capabilities to the community, help ALMA users with their proposal preparation, and trigger new ideas for an even more efficient use of the ALMA facility.

A new installment of ALMA Science Verification (SV) data is available. This release contains several new datasets corresponding to four targets observed as part of the 2014 ALMA Long Baseline Campaign in order to demonstrate the long baseline (~10 km), high angular resolution, capability of ALMA. Maximum baselines used ranged from 12.2 to 14.9 km.