The new Blu-ray disc technology will be introduced December 10th  2009 in the Science Archive Facility for the distribution of Service Mode (SM) PI packages to begin with. Blu-ray discs will be offered later in 2010 for archive requests. The ISO9660 file system with Joliet/Rock Ridge extensions will be used.

Meteorological data for Chajnantor, including the precipitable water vapour, are now available from the ESO archive. The data are obtained from the APEX weather station and radiometer. The ESO archive database contains all available APEX weather data from January, 1st 2007 onwards.

The Hubble Archive at the ST-ECF is pleased to announce that most data are now online in fully calibrated form ready for immediate download from the cache - no more waiting for on-the-fly processing is needed.

The Commissioning and Science Verification (SV) for HAWK-I were  carried out following the VLT Science Verification Policy and Procedures. The observations were taking place between October 2007 and January 2008.

The Science Verification (SV) of AMBER+FINITO+UTs is carried out following the same guidelines applied to all VLT instruments. The observations took place between 13 and 15 October, 2008.

The zCOSMOS redshift survey has been designed to efficiently utilize VIMOS by splitting the survey into two parts. The first, zCOSMOS-bright, aims to produce a redshift survey of approximately 20,000 I-band selected galaxies at redshifts z < 1.2. Covering the approximately 1.7 deg² of the COSMOS field (essentially the full ACS-covered area), the transverse dimension at z ~ 1 is 75 Mpc. The second part, zCOSMOS-deep, will observe about 10,000 galaxies selected through well-defined colour selection criteria which mostly lie at 1.5 < z < 3.0. Simply to keep the required amount of telescope time manageable, the field of zCOSMOS-deep is restricted to the central 1 deg² of the COSMOS field.

The Science Demonstration (SD) of MAD is carried out largely following the philosophy applied to the Science Verification of the VLT instruments. MAD SD runs took place in November 2007 (SD1), January 2008 (SD2) and August 2008 (SD3).

AMBER, the near-infrared/red focal instrument of the VLTI, operates in the bands J, H, and, K (ie 1.0 to 2.4 μm). The instrument has been designed to be used with two or three beams, thus enabling also the use of closure phase techniques. The magnitude limits of AMBER are K=7 with Low Resolution (LR-HK) on UTs and K=5 on the ATs, K=4 with Medium Resolution K-band (MR-K) on the UTs and K=1.6 on the ATs, and K=1.5 with High Resolution K-band (HR-K) on UTs.

HAWK-I is a cryogenic wide-field imager installed at the Nasmyth A focus of UT4. The on-sky field of view is 7.5'x7.5', with a cross-shaped gap of 15" between the four HAWAII 2RG 2048x2048 pixels detectors. The pixel scale is of 0.106". The instrument is offered with 10 observing filters placed in two filter wheels: 4 broad band filters (Y(Z), J, H & K) and 6 narrow band filters (Bracket gamma, CH4, H2, 1.061 μm, 1.187 μm & 2.090 μm).

The Science Verification observations of the APEX Swedish Heterodyne Facility Instrument (SHFI) were observed in March 2008. ESO requested input from the community by issuing a call for SV projects in February 2008, with 39 proposals received. A selection of the APEX-1 proposals listed below have been observed during the week of joint SV observations in March 2008. The APEX-3 and APEX-T2 SV projects will be observed later in dynamical scheduling. ESO will also continue observing APEX-1 proposals during period 81.