The Near InfraRed Planet Searcher (NIRPS) instrument, mounted on ESO’s 3.6-m telescope at the La Silla Observatory in Chile, has successfully performed its first observations. The instrument will focus its search on rocky worlds, which are key targets for understanding how planets form and evolve, and are the most likely planets where life may develop. NIRPS will search for these rocky exoplanets around small, cool red dwarf stars — the most common type of stars in our Milky Way galaxy, which have masses from about two to ten times smaller than our Sun.

A major technical intervention was completed on ESPRESSO in May to address the instrument stability and the detector system performances. The improvement has been noticeable, achieving an internal drift below 10 cm/s and the detector’s readout noise below 6e- for the fast readout mode. The instrument is back in operation. The updated ESPRESSO performances will be included in the next version of the User Manual.

The European Interferometry Initiative (EII) is announcing its 11th VLTI School, funded by the Opticon/Radionet Pilot programme, which will take place in Budapest between 12 and 17 June 2023. The school is aimed at PhD students, postdocs and astronomers who are new to optical interferometry. The training will address basics of optical interferometry theory, data reduction and interpretation, model fitting, image reconstruction, as well as observation proposals preparation for VLTI. The local organising institute is the Konkoly Observatory in Hungary.  

A preview of the Cycles 9, 10 and 11 ALMA Configuration Schedule is now available. This schedule is being released to allow ALMA users to plan their proposal strategy for the next three Cycles.

A detailed report of the ALMA Cycle 9 Proposal Submission Statistics is now available. The report provides a summary of items such as the number of submitted proposals and time requested, subscription rates, and comparisons with the number of hours requested in previous Cycles. The report can be downloaded as a pdf document.

UltraVISTA (PIs J. Dunlop, M. Franx, J. Fynbo, O. LeFèvre, Programme ID 179.A-2005, 198.A-2003) is an ultra-deep near-infrared ESO Public Survey targeting the central region of the COSMOS field. This public survey started in April 2010 and has been completed during the VISTA Public Survey Cycle II in 2022. This new release (DR4.1) contains two independent multi-wavelength photometric catalogues, computed using different techniques. The CLASSIC catalogue is generated using an aperture photometric measurement method as that adopted in the previous COSMOS2015 catalogue. The second catalogue, labelled FARMER, is created using a new profile-fitting photometric tool which the UltraVISTA team developed. The FARMER catalogue uses a source list derived independently from the CLASSIC one. The data present in the previous COSMOS2015 catalogue have been reprocessed to take advantage of the improved astrometry from the Gaia reference catalogue.

Science workshops are an essential component of ESO's programmes and represent a unique opportunity to promote and foster ideas and collaborations within the scientific community. Every year, through the Directorate for Science, ESO provides support and funding to organise scientific workshops in Santiago and in Garching, as well as co-funding some external workshops (see ESO Workshops calendar). A new Call has been issued inviting community astronomers to submit proposals for ESO workshops to be held in 2023. Community astronomers can submit their proposals alone or teaming up with ESO staff and fellows in Chile and/or in Germany. Note that ESO has implemented a Code of Conduct for Workshops and Conferences, which applies to all meetings funded by ESO, hosted at ESO premises or organised as online events.   

GRAVITY+ is the ongoing upgrade of GRAVITY and the Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI) with wide-separation fringe tracking, new adaptive optics, and laser guide stars on all four 8-m Unit Telescopes (UTs), for ever-fainter, all-sky, high contrast, milliarcsecond interferometry. GRAVITY+ just reached its first milestone: GRAVITY Wide.

Gaia-ESO is an ESO Public Spectroscopic Survey (under ESO Programme IDs: 188.B-3002, 193.B-0936, 197.B-1074; PIs: Gerry Gilmore & Sofia Randich) carried out with GIRAFFE and UVES on the VLT between 2012 and 2018. The survey targeted more than 100,000 stars, with 115,000 actually observed by the end of the survey. These stars are selected across all major components of the Milky Way, from halo to star-forming regions, with the goal of providing an homogeneous overview of their kinematics and elemental abundance distributions.

In order to increase the visibility and legacy value of data collections in the ESO Science Archive, Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) have been created for them. DOIs provide permanent and unique links to text, web pages and other digital resources, in this case astronomical data. They are an important component towards ESO's ambition of supporting Open Data principles and making data FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable). With time it is planned to extend the creation of DOIs to contributed datasets, e.g., to reflect the exact list of files used in a paper.