This is the first announcement of the workshop ‘New Heights in Planet Formation’, to be held at ESO – Garching between 15 and 19 July 2024. In the past decade, facilities such as ALMA and VLT/SPHERE have transformed the field of planet formation, enabling both moderate resolution statistical disk surveys and high resolution imaging studies of disks. Today this field is driven by observations, and it seems to be continuing along this path with JWST and the many recently accepted Large Programs at different facilities. Theory and models are faced with the task of explaining much more complex scenarios of disk evolution, planet formation, planet-disk interaction. This workshop will bring together observers with expertise in different wavelength regimes, theorists, and modellers, to review the state of the art, pin-point the main open questions, and explore new venues. 

As previously announced, the workshop 'The promise and challenges of the ALMA Wideband Sensitivity Upgrade' will take place at ESO - Garching from the 24^th to the 28^th of June, 2024. This upgrade constitutes the top priority of the ALMA 2030 roadmap. It consists of an increase of the instantaneous spectral bandwidth by as much as a factor of four, while retaining full spectral resolution over the entire bandwidth, thus resulting in increases of the spectral scan speed up to a factor of 50 for the highest spectral resolution. In addition, an upgrade of the full signal chain of ALMA – from the receivers and digitizers, all the way through to the correlated data – will result in increases in sensitivity for all observations. 

The first public data release of the HARPS Radial Velocities Catalog contains measurements obtained from 2003 to 2023 with the High Accuracy Radial Velocity Planet Searcher (HARPS) spectrograph installed at the ESO 3.6m telescope in La Silla Observatory (Chile). The catalog comprises 289843 observations of 6488 unique astronomical objects. A total of 282294 radial velocities are reported in this catalog and are obtained using the HARPS pipeline (typical precision of 0.5 m/s) and 288972 independent radial velocities that are measured on the H_alpha spectral line (typical error of around 300 m/s).

The VISTA Extragalactic Infrared Legacy Survey (VEILS, PI: Banerji, Program ID:198.A-2005) is a deep J and Ks-band transient and wide-field survey being conducted using the VIRCAM camera with the primary goals of understanding the epoch of reionisation, the build-up of massive galaxies, and constraining the cosmological equation of state using both Type 1a supernovae and AGN dust lag measurements. The total VEILS surveyed area is 9 sq-deg of the extragalactic sky over three fields: XMM-LSS, CDFS and ELAIS-S1. The data acquisition for the VEILS survey was successfully completed in 2022 prior to the VIRCAM decommissioning

The User Support Department again extends its sincere thanks to all those Principal Investigators and their Phase 2 delegates who participated in this year's online Paranal Service Mode User Satisfaction Survey.  A total of 146 responses were received from the targeted campaign.  As in the past, where possible, respondents who provided detailed comments have been contacted via e-mail. A summary report based on this latest User Satisfaction Survey is now available.

The European Southern Observatory’s Extremely Large Telescope (ESO’s ELT) will have a 39-metre main mirror and will be the largest telescope in the world for visible and infrared light. Construction of this technically complex project is advancing at a good pace, with the ELT now surpassing the 50% complete milestone.

The scientific objective of the XShooter ESO Large Program 1104.B-0370 INSPIRE (PI: C. Spiniello), is to create the first catalogue of spectroscopically confirmed relics in the redshift range 0.1<z<0.5, which bridges the gap between the three local confirmed relics and the high-z red nugget galaxies. The availability of this sample of objects enables to put stringent constraint on the predictions from simulations on the initial intense phase of star formation in passive galaxies.

The ESO Archive Science portal was upgraded to include previews and thumbnails of ALMA data, alongside those for La Silla Paranal. They provide a rich and concise overview of the data to guide users in identifying those of interest. Hovering with the mouse on the Actions column in the result table pops up the preview thumbnail. Clicking on the icon in the same column opens a dedicated page, where a detailed preview directly from the ALMA Science Archive is displayed. Previews and thumbnails are only presented for publicly available data, both for ALMA and La Silla Paranal.

A beta release of the new ESO Data Processing System (EDPS) is now available for download. EDPS is a system to automatically organise data from ESO instruments for pipeline processing and running the pipelines on these data. The current recommended usage of EDPS is for experimenting and batch processing. KMOS, ESPRESSO and the UVES pipelines are supported. More pipelines will be added in the next few months.

This is the first announcement of the ESO workshop 'The promise and challenges of the ALMA Wideband Sensitivity Upgrade' to take place at ESO - Garching from 24 to 28 June 2024. This upgrade constitutes the top priority of the ALMA 2030 roadmap. It consists of an increase of the instantaneous spectral bandwidth by as much as a factor of four, while retaining full spectral resolution over the entire bandwidth, thus resulting in increases of the spectral scan speed up to a factor of 50 for the highest spectral resolution. In addition, an upgrade of the full signal chain of ALMA – from the receivers and digitizers, all the way through to the correlated data – will result in increases in sensitivity for all observations.