Announcement from the Italian Node
11-13 December 2017 - Istituto di Radioastronomia Bologna, Italy

The Italian ALMA Regional Centre organizes a 2-day workshop on self-calibration and advanced imaging, to be held at the INAF-Istituto di Radioastronomia (Bologna, Italy) on 11-13 December 2017.

Submillimetre/mm/cm QUESO Workshop 2017

The submillimetre/mm/cm QUESO Workshop 2017 (Centimetre-Sub-Millimetre Q&U (and V) European Southern Observatory Workshop) was held at ESO Garching from 25-27 October, 2017. The presentations are now available to download from the programme page.

Announcement from the German Node
The course Radio Interferometry: Methods and Science will be  organized by the German ARC node and offers a hands-on overview of major aspects of radio/mm/submm interferometry for master students, PhD students and senior astronomers. The course is planned to start in April 2018.

The Joint ALMA Observatory invites applications for the position of:

ALMA Head of Science Operations - Santiago

The Joint ALMA Observatory (JAO) is seeking a senior science manager, with extensive experience, to lead the Department of Science Operations (DSO), which is responsible for the science operations of the international ALMA radio astronomy observatory in Chile. This is an outstanding opportunity to lead the scientific operations of the most ambitious ground-based observatory operational in the world today, delivering unique scientific data to a world-wide user community of approximately 4000 professional astronomers.

The initial deadline for receipt of applications to be considered for the position is November 24, 2017. However, applications will continue to be accepted until the position is filled.

ALMA Cycle 5 successfully started on 1 October 2017.  Principal Investigator observations have started with the longest configurations (~16 km). Therafter, the Array will be reconfigured continuously until it reaches the most compact baselines in July 2018. ALMA users may check the configuration schedule and the real-time observing status at any time.

The Portuguese ALMA CENTER of Expertise (PACE) on behalf of the Institute of Astronomy and Space Sciences, in collaboration with the ESO and the RadioNet consortium (grant agreement No 730562), is glad to announce that an "ALMA Data Processing Workshop" will take place in Lisbon on 5th (afternoon), 6th, and 7th of December.

More details on the outcome of the ALMA Cycle 5 review are now available. The highest priority Cycle 5 projects are listed on a dedicated webpage. In addition a full report describes the proposal review process in detail, and presents the proposal statistics and regional distribution, as well as the distribution of proposals across science categories and receiver bands. The report can be downloaded here.

The anticipated configuration schedule for Cycle 5 has been modified from that posted in the Proposer's Guide and the updated schedule is available at the following link: https://almascience.eso.org/news/observing/observing-configuration-schedule. The changes were made to optimise the schedule in response to the pressure from the top-rated proposals in Cycle 5 and the adverse weather at the ALMA site, which affected the configuration schedule at the end of Cycle 4. The most significant change is that Cycle 5 will begin in the configuration C43-10 instead of C43-7, and then move to more compact configurations.