The Proposal Handling Team is organising a series of online sessions in which they will present the Cycle 9 distributed peer review process and guidelines for reviewing proposals. The sessions will consist of a presentation followed by a live question and answer session. Sessions targeted to the European community will take place:

Thursday May 05, 13:00 UTC   and  Tuesday May 10, 15:00 UTC.

Since Oct 2019, the EU ARC is offering its users the "CalMS" service which has so far provided 155 unique users with more than 1750 calibrated MeasurementSets (MSs). As its popularity increases, further features are added to the system. Users can now:

• immediately produce line images and cubes making use of the continuum subtraction performed by the pipeline,
• request the calibrated data for particular calibrator targets,
• identify MOUSs which belong to the same Group OUS.

Current ALMA products can be characterized as "science-ready calibration, informative imaging". This means that PIs and archive users may need to repeat the imaging process to obtain products that are optimised for their specific scientific analysis. The purpose of this new development study is to investigate the potential interest of generating "science-optimised" products. These Advanced Data Products may include:

• science-grade products for every ALMA observing project;
• high-level science products based on, e.g., the combination of different observations of the same object;
• derived products such as catalogues, spectra, SEDs, etc.

The next talk of the series will be presented by Davide Fedele (INAF Osservatorio Astrofisico di Arcetri), on May 4th at 14:00 CEST, who will address the question: How and when does planet-formation happen in disks? The talk will be broadcast on the Youtube channel of the European ALMA Regional Centre network.

The ALMA Director, on behalf of the Joint ALMA Observatory (JAO) and the partner organizations in East Asia, Europe, and North America, is pleased to announce the ALMA Cycle 9 Call for Proposals (CfP) for scientific observations to be scheduled from October 2022 to September 2023.

More information can be found on the ALMA Science Portal.

ALMA has released a new document for Cycle 9 called Using ALMA archival data - A Primer.  This document provides basic introductory information of how to use the ALMA data available through the ALMA Science Archive (ASA), including how to query, extract and scientifically exploit the content of the ASA. The aim is to assist readers with the exploitation of archived ALMA data by providing a concise summary of the data and practical examples that include CASA tasks.

The German ARC node offers hands-on training in the reduction and analysis of ALMA data in their online Master-level course Radio Interferometry 2022 in the months of April to July 2022.

The next talk of the series will be presented by Alaro Hacar (University of Vienna), on April 6 at 14:00 CEST, who will address the question: What is the role of filaments in star formation and how are they shaped? The talk will be broadcast on the Youtube channel of the European ALMA Regional Centre network.