VIDEO is a deep near-infrared survey which targets ~12 square degrees over the Elais-S1, XMM-LSS, and extended Chandra Deep Field South (CDFS) extragalactic fields. VIDEO belongs to the suite of six public surveys being conducted at the Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy (VISTA). First data releases of the Elais-S1 and CDFS fields have just been made available.

The latest integral field spectrograph (IFS) on the VLT, the Multi-Unit Spectroscopic Explorer (MUSE), has recently undergone its first commissioning period - see details in the Release. A second commissioning period will take place in April followed by Science Verification a few months later. MUSE is first offered to the community for observation in Period 94 (October 2014 т?? March 2015).

A new observing time calculator is now available for the Artemis 350ТЕm camera offered on APEX in Period 94. This calculator assumes a field of view of 4.7У?2.5 arcminutes, with fully sampled pixels in the 350ТЕm focal plane. The 450ТЕm and 200ТЕm planes are not offered in Period 94. Note that this is only a preliminary version of the calculator, as the full commissioning of Artemis will be performed in June 2014.

Statistics on refereed publications in 2013 that make use of data from ESO telescopes have been released by the ESO library. The statistics are calculated using the ESO Telescope Bibliography (telbib), a database of refereed publications that use ESO data. The annual summary of the publication statistics, with breakdown by telescopes and instruments and comparison with other observatories, is available as Basic ESO Publication Statistics.

The zCOSMOS-bright advanced data products are now available via the Science Data Products query form of the ESO Archive. The zCOSMOS large programme on the VLT used VIMOS for a redshift survey in the 1.7 square degree COSMOS field. The zCOSMOS-bright Data Release 2 made available 10643 spectra to i_AB < 22.5 mag.

The ALMA Observatory has issued a news update on the status of ALMA Cycle 1 observations. The planned configurations and the next steps for commissioning are also included. Read the report in PDF.