Following the ESO Scientific and Technical Committee recommendation, the process started in 2024 with the call, selection and approval of the KMOS Spectroscopic Public Surveys is now completed and resulted in two public survey projects, EMPOWER (extragalactic) and VVVX-GalCen Spectroscopic survey (galactic). These two surveys are now starting their data acquisition since January 2026 and will collect data over the next three years. The approved survey management plans detailing the observing strategies, data reductions and data releases are published on the ESO web pages.

This international conference, jointly organised by ESO, INAF - Arcetri and Macquarie University, aims to bring together the diverse scientific communities developing and preparing to exploit these instruments. Although each facility has unique strengths - MAVIS pushing diffraction-limited performance into the visible on an 8-m telescope, and the ELT instruments delivering unmatched infrared sensitivity and resolution on a 39-m aperture - their science cases are deeply complementary.

The stellar 'Initial Mass Function' (IMF) is a fundamental observable and a crucial component for the understanding of a vast range of astrophysical processes. It is suspected to have its roots in the mass distribution of dense molecular cloud cores resulting from molecular cloud fragmentation, but what shapes this 'Core Mass Function' (CMF) and how core masses really relate to stellar masses, remains unclear. This ESO workshop will summarize and discuss recent observational and theoretical progress on these questions and explore ways forward with ongoing progress in instrumentation (e.g., ALMA upgrade, ELT(s)). The deadline for abstract submissions is 15 February 2026.

ESO is pleased to announce the second and final Phase3 data release of the Large Programme SUPER - SINFONI Survey for Unveiling the Physics and the Effect of Radiative feedback, programme id 196.A-0377, PI V. Manieri. It uses SINFONI in Seeing-Enhancer mode to study Active Galactic Nuclei at z=2-2.5. The AO assisted observations reach a PSF of 0.2 arcsec in K-band.

Olivier Chesneau, one of the most active and prolific members of the optical interferometry community, passed away in May 2014, at the age of 41. To honour his work in this field, his home institute, the Laboratoire J.-L. Lagrange at the Observatoire de la Côte d’Azur in France, and ESO established a prize in his memory. Since 2015, the prize has been awarded biennially for the best PhD thesis completed in the field of high angular resolution optical astronomy.