The acceptance of the ALMA Cycle 2 software, required for Cycle 2 observations and paving the way for the start of Cycle 2 observation in early June 2014, will shortly be announced. Part of the Cycle 2 software is an on-line interface to the ALMA calibrator source catalogue, which will soon be available on the ALMA science portal. A brief description of the ALMA calibrator survey was recently published.

The User Support Department (USD) would like to thank all those Principal Investigators and their Phase 2 delegates who filled in the on-line User Satisfaction Survey. As of mid-March 2014, 155 responses were received from our targeted campaign. We have contacted, when possible, those respondents who provided detailed comments. A summary report of the User Satisfaction Survey is now available.

Access to reduced scientific data from the VLT X-shooter spectrograph is now provided from the Science Archive Facility. 33000 spectra of all kinds of sources obtained in ECHELLE,SLIT mode, from the beginning of X-shooter operations in October 2009 until the end of 2013, have been published. The X-shooter reduced data collection will grow with time in monthly release cycles as reduced products become available.

ESO Workshop, ESO Headquarters, Garching, Germany, 24òÀÓ28 November 2014

Recent years have seen a huge development in high-resolution techniques, which are critical to progress in many different areas of astronomy. These techniques can be divided into direct methods (e.g., adaptive optics, lucky imaging), interferometry (including speckle imaging and spectro-astrometry) and reconstruction methods (astrotomography). This workshop aims to bring together the different communities working in these fields increasing the synergies among them.

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.

The science verification (SV) for the Multi-Unit Spectroscopic Explorer (MUSE) will take place on the nights of 20òÀÓ29 June 2014. All community astronomers are kindly invited to participate in this opportunity to obtain early science with MUSE and thus to demonstrate the scientific capabilities of this unique instrument.

The 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.

The proposal submission for ESO Period 94 closed on 27 March 2014. 901 proposals were received requesting 2389 nights in total, including 23 Large Programme and 44 Target of Opportunity (ToO) proposals.

Two software tools to correct astronomical spectra for telluric absorption (molecfit) and emission (skycorr) lines have been publicly released. They have been developed for ESO by a team of astronomers at the Institute for Astro- and Particle Physics at the University of Innsbruck, as part of the Austrian in-kind contribution. In addition, a model of the sky emission and transmission spectrum at Cerro Paranal is also available.

The VISTA Magellanic Survey (VMC) òÀÓ one of the six public surveys current at the Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy (VISTA) òÀÓ aims at determining the spatially resolved star formation history and 3D geometry of the Magellanic system. The VMC survey is designed to reach stars below the oldest main-sequence turn-off and the multi-epoch strategy enables accurate Ks mean magnitudes for variable stars, e.g. RR Lyrae stars and Cepheids, to be measured. Catalogues from some of the deep co-added survey images have now been released.