Second Announcement of the ALMA Band 1 Science Workshop
ASIAA, Taipei, (Taiwan), 16-18 January 2017

The ALMA Band 1 Science Workshop will take place at the ASIAA (Academia Sinica, Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics) in Taipei (Taiwan) from January 16 to 18 2017. It will consist of a few invited talks on the main scientific goals of ALMA Band 1, plus contributed talks. We also plan to have poster sessions. The ALMA Band 1 Science workshop will provide the first opportunity to show the exciting new science ALMA Band 1 can deliver and to start preparing for the first observing proposals in the ALMA lowest frequency band.

For more information please go to https://events.asiaa.sinica.edu.tw/workshop/20170116/

ALMA Post-Doctoral Fellow
OSF, San Pedro de Atacama

The JAO is offering a postdoctoral fellowship position to join the ALMA science operations group in Santiago, Chile. The ALMA Postdoctoral Fellow will be appointed for a period of three years and will spend 50% of his/her time dedicated to personal scientific research. The remaining time will be spent in support of ALMA operations, including observing at the ALMA Operations Support Facility (OSF) near San Pedro de Atacama for hands-on interaction with the telescope.

The deadline for this vacancy is 30 December 2016.

ESO Workshop, Garching, Germany, 1–3 February 2017

The frequency range from 160 to 210 GHz covered by ALMA Band 5 is one of the least explored to date. This band is expected to be offered in ALMA Cycle 5, but has already been extensively used in the SEPIA instrument on APEX since 2015. Important science topics covered by Band 5 include the 183 GHz H₂O line, a wide range of dense molecular gas tracers (HCN(2-1), HNC(2-1), HCO⁺(2-1), etc), CO(2-1) at 0.077<z<0.414, [C I] and high-J CO lines in high redshift objects, and eventually the [C II] line at z>8.

Memo from the ALMA Director and Operations Managers

The fundamental product of the ALMA Observatory is, and will remain, calibrated data and images. At the same time, the Observatory has been steadily increasing its performance in terms of efficiency, stability and time available for PI-driven science and, as a result, a steady increase in data production. We, at ALMA, aspire to maintain the quality of the delivered data. In the short-term, this will imply some extended data delivery timescales as the Observatory copes with the increased data load and the calibration and imaging pipeline matures to routine and more automated processing.

Following the main ALMA conference "Half a Decade of ALMA: Cosmic Dawns Transformed" held in Palm Springs (California) from 20 to 23 September 2016, the 2nd ALMA Postdoc Symposium took place during the weekend of 24/25 September. More than 15 postdocs working for the different ALMA Regional Centres gathered together to share their scientific research and knowledge about the different activities related to ALMA. This time, a number of postdocs not directly associated with the ALMA Regional Centres but working with ALMA data were invited to participate and join the discussions.

The UK ALMA Regional Centre Node would like to invite UK ALMA data users to a data reduction/processing event at Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics (UoM campus) to be held on 21 - 25 November 2016. The focus of the workshop is to explore and to work on either own ALMA data or archival data with the assistance of UK ARC Node personnel and ARC Node computing resources.

A new version of CASA, version 4.7.0. has been released. This latest release 4.7.0 is available on Linux with Red Hat and Mac OSX with El Capitan and Yosemite operating systems. CASA may also work on other flavors of Linux. The list above covers those operating systems that on which regular test are done.

More details can be obtained from the CASA Web site.

A detailed report on the outcome of the ALMA Cycle 4 Proposal Review Process is now available. The report details the proposal review process, proposal statistics and regional distributions, as well as the proposal distribution across science categories and receiver bands.