The VLTI Community Days meeting will take place at ESO Garching on the 11, 12 and 13 of May 2026 (participation available via MS Teams). The meeting will be dedicated to the current status, scientific exploitation, and future evolution of the Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI) and the programme will cover recent and ongoing developments at the VLTI, with a strong focus on GRAVITY+ and ASGARD, as well as the status and prospects for MATISSE and PIONIER. The meeting will combine technical and operational updates, with science talks, together with time for discussion.

Observations with the VLT, VLTI, and ALMA have pioneered exoplanet science over the past decade. With upcoming results from ESA missions such as Gaia, PLATO, and Ariel, exoplanet research is entering a transformative era of large-scale characterisation surveys. This ESO workshop will bring the community together to explore how current ESO facilities together with powerful archival resources, can best complement exoplanet demographics, atmospheres, and planet formation at the dawn of population-scale studies.

The User Support Department would like to once again thank all Principal Investigators and their Phase 2 delegates who took part in the 2025 online Paranal Service Mode User Satisfaction Survey. A total of 101 responses were received in this targeted campaign. As in past years, we have followed up by e-mail with respondents who provided detailed comments and identified themselves. A summary report based on the latest survey is now available.

With the release of the La Silla Paranal telescope schedule, the Phase 2 preparation for runs scheduled in Service Mode begins. The deadline for the submission of the Phase 2 material for Period 117 is Tuesday, 17 March 2026. P117 is the first yearly period for observations between 1 May 2026 and 30 April 2027.

The time allocation process for ESO telescopes for Period 117 has been completed. This was based on the scientific evaluation of the Distributed Peer Review (DPR) and the Observing Programmes Committee (OPC), who met in November 2025 to provide recommendations to the ESO Director General. A total of 13070 hours of (Designated) Visitor Mode and Service Mode observations (excluding filler programmes) were allocated on the VLT/VLTI, the 3.6-metre, and NTT telescopes.

This data release presents the first public data products (DR1) from Looking into the faintEst WIth MUSE (LEWIS), an ESO Large Programme investigating extreme low-surface-brightness galaxies in the Hydra I cluster using the Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer (MUSE) on the ESO Very Large Telescope. The observations were obtained in service mode between December 2021 and March 2025 under ESO programme 108.222P, P.I. E. Iodice.

The ESO Public Survey project VMC, ESO program 179.B-2003, PI M. R. Cioni, targets the Magellanic Cloud system in three filters: Y, J and Ks. The main goals are the determination of the spatially resolved star formation history and study the three-dimensional geometry of the system. The sensitivity of the data is designed to reach sources below the oldest main-sequence turn off point of the stellar population and the multi-epochs to measure accurate Ks mean magnitudes for pulsating variable stars, e.g. RR Lyrae stars and Cepheids. This last data release is based on the complete observations for the VMC survey and data from twelve additional programmes, which add multi-epoch observations to the VMC footprint.

Dear colleagues,

After 63 years since its establishment on the basis of international cooperation, ESO is now de facto evolving "from world-class to world-leading", in light of the huge progress within its strategy for the 2020s. Let me share with you some achievements and challenges that developed during 2025.

After the great success of the program in the last seven editions, ESO is delighted to announce that the call for applications for the 8th ESO Summer Research Programme is now open. This fully funded program is available to students in STEM fields who have not yet started a Ph.D. program and have completed at least two years of their degree.

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)).