_______________________________________________________

2007 ESO Instrument Calibration Workshop

January 23-26 2007

Garching, Germany

Web page at: http://www.eso.org/cal07
Contact e-mail: cal07@eso.org
_________________________________________________________

Dear Colleague:


The ESO La Silla Paranal Observatory (LPO) is currently operating 19
optical, NIR, and MIR instruments (9 VLT, 2 VLTI, 8 La Silla).  
To monitor and calibrate both the performance of each of these
instruments and the quality of the data they deliver, ESO executes
dedicated calibration plans.  These systematic and regular
measurements further aid in the calibration of data from science
programs, at least to specified levels of accuracy.

The first ESO/ST-ECF workshop on Calibrating and understanding HST and
ESO instruments was held in 1995 to review the calibration strategies
of HST and ESO La Silla instruments and to prepare for the start of
operation of the VLT.

Now in 2006, after seven years of science operation with the
innnovative, complex, and still growing instrumentation suite at the
VLT, it is timely to review the achievements and limitations of the
established instrument calibration plans together with the ESO user
community.

Therefore, we invite you to join us at the first ESO Instrument
Calibration Workshop to be held from 23 - 26 January 2007 at the ESO
headquarters in Garching, Germany.

The goals of this workshop are

* to foster the sharing of information, experience and techniques
  between observers, instrument developers, and instrument operation
  teams, 
* to review the actual precisions and limitations of the applied
  instrument calibration plans, 
* to collect the actual and future requirements by the ESO users.  

Workshop topics are

* the calibration and data reduction of
  - Optical Spectro-Imagers
  - Optical Multi-object Spectrographs
  - NIR and MIR Spectro-Imagers
  - High-Resolution Spectrographs
  - Integral Field Spectrographs
  - Adaptive Optics Instruments
  - Polarimetric Instruments
  - Wide-field Imagers
  - Interferometric Instruments
* Pipelines, Quality Control, Science Archive, AVO
* Data-Reduction Systems, Software and Techniques

The workshop will be focussed on ESO instrumentation. A limited time
of the workshop will be dedicated to new instruments on the horizon of
the LPO, i.e., the VST, VISTA, and the VLT 2nd generation
instruments. Future challenges as arising with ELT instrumentation are
of interest for the workshop but their presentation will be limited to
invited talks.

We expect that this workshop will lead to improved calibration plans
to the benefit of the entire ESO user community as well as the ESO
Science Archive.


LOCATION
The conference will take place at the ESO headquarters in Garching, Germany.
Details will be available at the conference web page 
(http://www.eso.org/cal07).


IMPORTANT DATES
    * October 9, 2006       Early Registration deadline
    * November 6, 2006      Final Registration deadline
    * December 4, 2006      Abstract submission deadline
    * December 4, 2006      Hotel booking deadline
    * January 23-26, 2007   Workshop
    * April 1, 2007         Proceeding contribution deadline


REGISTRATION 
If you are interested to participate in the calibration workshop,
please register online at
http://www.eso.org/cal07/registration.html.

The conference fee is still TBD but will not be more than EUR 150 
and includes one copy of the workshop proceedings.


PROGRAM
In addition to overview talks by the ESO instrument operation teams
(IOTs) invited talks, contributed papers (oral or poster) are
planned. The OC will select a limited number of contributions for oral
presentation on the basis of the submitted abstracts.


PROCEEDINGS
The proceedings of the conference will be published in the
Springer-Verlag "ESO Astrophysics Symposia" Series. All contributions
(posters and oral presentations) will be included in the proceedings
book. More details will be available later.


CONTACT INFORMATION
For inquiries concerning travel, accommodation, and other logistic details, 
please contact the workshop webpage at http://www.eso.org/cal07/


Please feel free to disseminate this information among your colleagues.

We are looking forward to meeting you in Garching.

On behalf of the Organizing Committee,

With best regards,
Andreas Kaufer


ORGANIZING COMMITTEE
Reinhard Hanuschik
Andreas Kaufer (chair)
Florian Kerber
Nando Patat
Michele Peron
Martino Romaniello
Michael Sterzik
Christina Stoffer
Lowell Tacconi-Garman