Dear colleagues,

From several viewpoints, 2024 was a year when ESO started to move towards new future avenues, while running very strong on its current commitments.

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 115 is Thursday, 6 February 2025. The Service Mode guidelines provide detailed information about Phase 2 material preparation using the web application p2, while the instrument overview table provides quick links to user manuals, tools and p2 tutorials for individual instruments.

Registration and abstract submision are now open for the ESO conference "Galactic Ecosystems under the Microscope: Lessons from Highly-Resoved Studies", Garching bei München, Germany, 7th to 11th July 2025. This workshop is dedicated to exploring the latest developments in resolved galaxy properties and evolution. With next-generation observatories like JWST, ELT, and the SKA, upgrades to ALMA and VLA, we are entering a new era in understanding these critical aspects of galaxies throughout cosmic history.

ESO is pleased to announce that binary packages for the installation of ESO Pipelines are now available for all commonly used operating systems. This results in a faster and more reliable installation compared to compiling locally from source. Compiled binaries can be installed using the Homebrew package manager under Linux, MacOS or Windows. Alternatively, RPM binaries can be installed within the Apptainer container system or natively in some versions of Linux Fedora or CentOS. Source code installation is still available for all operating systems, including with MacPorts on MacOS. 

After the great success of the program in the last six editions, ESO is delighted to announce that the call for applications for the 7^th 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. This year, ESO is offering several projects covering a variety of topics. Successful applicants will be invited to work at the ESO Headquarters in Garching for six weeks between 30 June and 8 August 2025.

This is the initial announcement for the upcoming ESO workshop "Planetary Formation and Exoplanets in the ELT era" at ESO Garching, 17 - 21 November 2025. This workshop will discuss the understanding of how giant and rocky planets form and evolve, their internal structure
and that of their atmosphere, in the context of the Extremely Large Telescope (ELT).

A detailed report on the results of the ACA Standalone Cycle 8 2021 Supplemental Call is now available. The report details the proposal statistics and regional distributions, as well as the proposal distribution across science categories and receiver bands.

The report can be downloaded as a pdf document.

VANDELS is a deep Public Spectroscopic Survey of high-redshift galaxies with the VIMOS spectrograph. It is designed to exploit the multi-wavelength imaging and near-IR grism spectroscopy available in the CANDELS UDS and CDFS fields. The goal is to obtain spectra with sufficient signal-to-noise ratio to derive metallicities and velocity offsets from absorption and emission lines, allowing a detailed investigation of the physics of galaxies in the early Universe. Within an area of 0.2 deg², the survey will deliver more than 2500 high (15-20) signal-to-noise spectra of star forming galaxies in the redshift range 2.5 < z< 5.5, passive galaxies with H< 22.5 at 1.5 < z < 2.5, and star forming galaxies at 3.0 < z < 7.0 with H < 27, in the AB magnitude system.

The ALMA Long Baseline Campaign, taking place from 1 September to 30 November 2014, has been proceeding well. As a result, the observatory has decided to expand the scope of the capabilities to be demonstrated with two Science Verification (SV) targets with Band 7: the pre-main sequence star HL Tau and the gravitational lens SDP 81. Information on ALMA SV can be found here.

The project "Equation of State: SupErNovae trace Cosmic Expansion" (ESSENCE) aimed to collect ~200 Type Ia SNe over the redshift range 0.15 to 0.75 to study the equation of state of Dark Energy. Spectra were taken for this project with FORS1 in a Large Programme (ID 170.A-0519) and published by Matheson et al. 2005. Advanced data products are now available for these spectra via the query form of the Science Archive.