The ESO research studentship programme provides an outstanding opportunity for Ph.D. students to experience the exciting scientific environment at one of the world's leading observatories for a period of up to two years.

Science verification of the X-shooter data products for SLIT mode observations has been completed. Issues with the data products, such as the noise model, bad pixel propagation and interpolation, and flux calibration, were found and a new improved version of the pipeline has been released and can be downloaded.

Improved flux standards and a more detailed pipeline tutorial will be released in the second quarter of 2013.

On 13 March 2013 from 11:30–13:00 CLST (15:30–17:00 CET), the official inauguration of the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) will take place at the observatory’s Operations Support Facility (OSF) at the Chajnantor Plateau, in the Chilean Andes.

ALMA Observatory will accept submission of Director's Discretionary Time (DDT) proposals from 1 March 2013. In Cycle 1, a maximum of 5% of the total observation time available may be dedicated to the execution of DDT programmes.

A description of proposals eligible for DDT and the applicable policies are available. ALMA DDT requests can be submitted here.

A new and more powerful laser has successfully been tested at the Paranal Observatory and formally accepted. This new laser source, called PARLA, forms a vital part of the VLT Laser Guide Star Facility (LGSF),  currently used by the adaptive optics instruments NACO and SINFONI on  UT4.

The Call for Proposals for observation at ESO telescopes during Period 92 (1 October 2013–31 March 2014) has been released.

Note that the Call for Proposals document has undergone a substantial change in Period 92; it now focuses on listing the main news items and policies related to applying for time on ESO telescopes. The technical information about the offered instruments and facilities is contained on ESO web pages that are linked from the Call for Proposals.

The fetching of data from archive requests by ftp service has been discontinued.

A new version of ESO's pipeline reduction environment (Reflex 2.4) was made available on 6 May 2013. Reflex allows easy and intuitive execution of reduction pipelines, including interactive inspection of intermediate results and tuning of pipeline parameters. The new version includes improvements to the interactive GUIs, bug fixes, and significant improvements to some of the supported pipelines.