The ALMA Early Science Cycle 2 Call for Proposals has been issued. The full Call and all the information and tools relevant for proposal preparation are available through the ALMA Science Portal. The proposal deadline is 5 December 2013 with the start of Cycle 2 observations expected in June 2014. Cycle 1 high priority projects that remain uncompleted at that time will be transferred into Cycle 2 upon PI approval; see the status report for details.

The science results coming from ESO's facilities are not just of interest to the astronomical community, but also to the public at large. ESO's education and Public Outreach Department (ePOD) is always pleased to hear about new results that might make ESO science press releases. Such releases not only give your results wider coverage òÀÔ often in national newspapers and broadcast media all around the world òÀÔ but also raise public awareness of ESO itself and its achievements. ePOD can help with preparing an engaging text as well as impressive visuals, images and videos, to enhance the impact.

In a collaboration between the Observatoire de la C†‡te d'Azur (OCA, Nice) and ESO, stellar radial velocities, and atmospheric parameters, including effective temperature, surface gravity, mean metallicity and enrichment in alpha-elements, have been obtained by analyzing 21551 FEROS spectra from the Science Archive Facility with the MATISSE parameterisation algorithm. A dedicated web interface allows these data to be browsed, searched and downloaded. Associated data documentation can be consulted for more details.

The Science Archive Facility now provides community access to the first data products from the VST public survey projects. Following a year and a half of successful scientific operations, the VST public surveys have returned nearly 1.5 TB of reduced data products, which can be queried for and downloaded via dedicated query interfaces.

ESO has a prominent fellowship programme in both Garching (Germany) and Santiago (Chile), with a yearly application deadline. The goal of these fellowships is to offer outstanding early-career scientists the opportunity to further develop their independent research programmes in an exciting scientific environment with close contact to the activities and staff at ESO.

A new version of ACE, the Access Control at ESO, has been released. This tool enables successful ESO proposal PIs to delegate and share with their collaborators access to the Phase 2 observation preparation, retrieval of proprietary data from the Science Archive and delegation for the Phase 3 data products submission.

Staff vacancies for the senior position of Director for Science, based in Garching, and for an operations astronomer at Paranal to support VLTI have been opened. The deadlines are 8 September and 31 August 2013, respectively. ESO Fellowships are also open for application with a deadline of 15 October 2013. Full details can be found on the ESO Recruitment Portal.

The KMOS Science Verification (SV) programme consists of 20 proposals covering topics from exoplanets to distant galaxies. The first set of SV observations (SV1) took place during 24òÀÓ30 June 2013.

New data products resulting from the VISTA public surveys are now available via the Phase 3 query interface from the Science Archive Facility.The current release of data from the VVV, VHS, VIKING, and VMC surveys (6.2 TB) covers mostly the period from October 2010 to September 2011 and consists of astrometrically and photometrically calibrated mosaiced and co-added images (each 1.5 square degrees), weight maps and associated single band source lists in the different bands of each survey.

As of April 2013, upgrades in network, data transfer software and archive software have enabled a significant reduction in the time it takes for an APEX observation to be available to users. Over the period since October 2012 this time has been cut by more than two-thirds, and now stands at close to 48 hours, enabling PIs to provide feedback on their ongoing observations.