This release provides reduced Ks-band mosaics of the Hubble Frontier Fields obtained with the High Acuity Wide field K-band Imager (HAWK-I) at the ESO VLT 8.2-meter Unit Telescope. The first two fields, Abell 2744 and MACS-0416, were observed with HAWK-I on UT4 in P92 and the second two fields, Abell S1063 and Abell 370, were observed in P95 (PI: Gabriel Brammer).

New release of UltraVISTA Public Survey data via the ESO Science Archive Facility UltraVISTA is an ultra-deep near-infrared survey of the central region of the COSMOS field. This third UltraVISTA data release comprises stacked images in YJHKs and NB118 narrow-band filters together with a five-band merged catalogue. The principal difference with respect to the DR2 release is a substantial increase in exposure time in all five bands (by a factor of 1.7-4.6) in the four "ultra-deep stripes" regions, corresponding to an increase in depth of 0.4 to 0.8 magnitudes.

The first commissioning run of the HARPS Laser Frequency Comb (LFC) was held from 8 – 17 April 2015. The HARPS LFC is described in a Messenger article (Lo Curto et al. 2012). During this commissioning, the emphasis was mainly on calibration but several science spectra were acquired: four asteroids and twenty stars were repeatedly observed to monitor their radial velocity variations and to compare with published data.

The APEX Telescope Large Area Survey of the Galaxy (ATLASGAL) is an imaging survey covering 420 sq. deg of the inner Galactic plane at a wavelength of 870μm. The observations were carried out between 2007 and 2010, using the LABOCA bolometer array at the APEX telescope. The current release consists of emission maps covering the full area surveyed, split in 3x3 sq. deg tiles. The noise level reached is typically 60 mJy/beam, with an angular resolution of 19''. An other set of images, in which the LABOCA data have been combined with observations from the Planck satellite, in order to recover the most spatially extended emission, is also available. In addition to the source catalogues associated to each image, a compact source catalogue extracted in a different way is provided and searchable via the ESO Catalogue Facility.

Since Sept 2015, SPHERE ZIMPOL calibrations (flats, modulation calibrations, and pinhole images) suffer from the following issue: the first plane(s) of the raw frame data cube can show no or less counts from the lamp than the remaining planes of the cube.

zCOSMOS (PI: Simon Lilly, ESO Large Programme 175.A-0839) is a large redshift survey undertaken in the COSMOS field using the VIMOS spectrograph. About 600 hours were awarded to this large programme, which was executed between 2005 and 2010.

The issue with the GIRAFFE Medusa2^(*) calibration data reported on January 11, 2016, is fixed for most of the science data taken after 2015-11-27. All master calibrations delivered through the calSelector raw2master mode can be used for science processing.

Currently, the FLAMES/GIRAFFE Medusa2^(*) data are affected by a change of the slit geometry due to a major earthquake on 27-Nov-2015^(**). The currently available reference dispersion solutions are only valid before that date. The 'calSelector' service currently delivers these reference calibrations also for Medusa2 data taken after that date. Using them for pipeline processing will in most cases yield dispersion solutions of poor quality. We will replace these reference calibrations with better ones as soon as possible. The Medusa1 data are not affected by this.

The ESO/VST Public Survey ATLAS is targeting 4500 square degrees of the Southern sky in five filters u,g,r,i,z to depths comparable to those of the SDSS. This survey is also complemented by near-infrared data from the VISTA Hemisphere and VIKING surveys.

The Run Progress Report web pages allow PIs and delegates to follow the progress of their Service Mode observations. Now they also indicate when pipeline-processed reduced data are available for download. These reduced data are automatically generated using certified master calibrations and appear within two months of the data acquisition. Please see the Run Progress Legend for more details on how to take advantage of this new service.