The ST-ECF is releasing the full set of ACS/WFC grism spectra into the Hubble Legacy Archive, consisting of 47919 1D and 2D spectra and associated multi-band image cutouts, extracted from 153 archival fields. This is the largest set of high-level spectroscopic data products publicly released to date. The ACS G800L grism spectra provides a wavelength range of 0.55-1.05µm, with a dispersion of 40Å/pixel and a resolution of ~80Å for point-like sources. These extracted spectra and associated ancillary data lead to the prompt classification of over 32000 unique sources and in many cases to the determination of the redshift of extra-galactic sources (galaxies and AGN).

VISTA, is a 4-m class wide field survey telescope for the southern hemisphere, equipped with a near infrared camera VIRCAM (1.65 degree diameter field of view at VISTA's nominal pixel size) containing 67 million pixels of mean size 0.339 arcsec and available broad band filters at Z,Y,J,H,Ks and a narrow band filter at 1.18 micron.

The LABOCA Extended Chandra Deep Field South (ECDFS) Submillimetre Survey (LESS) is a public legacy survey of the ECDFS at 870μm using the LABOCA camera (Siringo et al. 2009) on the APEX telescope (Gusten et al. 2006).

The HARPS polarimeter was commissioned in January 2010. The succesfull commissioning has allowed the full characterization of the polarimeter, and permitted to offer the new mode to the astronomical community starting from the ESO period 86. Read the announcement and the HARPS user manual for details.

Using the Infrared Spectrometer and Array Camera (ISAAC) mounted at the Antu Unit Telescope of the VLT at ESO's Cerro Paranal Observatory, Chile, deep near-infrared imaging observations of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field (HUDF) located within the Chandra Deep Field South region were carried out in Ks band. Based on public ESO archival data a single co-added image was created covering 5.40 arcmin² of the HUDF region with a total integration time of 25.3 hours, an effective PSF of 0.36 arcsec FWHM, and a 5-sigma depth for point sources of 25.60 mag (AB) which is 0.67 mag deeper than the respective image resulting from the VLT/ISAAC NIR imaging survey that was carried out to support the GOODS project. To this end, data of the 21-hours integration obtained under ESO program 73.A-0764, led by I. Labbe, were combined with the ca. 6-hours integration of this field obtained under program 168.A-0485, led by C. Cesarsky (ESO/GOODS). The data set presented here was described in Retzlaff et al. 2010, A&A in press and utilized to characterize the completeness and contamination of the shallower GOODS survey tile F14 and to establish number counts of faint galaxies in Ks band.

XSHOOTER is the first of the second generation instruments at VLT. It it has been built by a Consortium of Institutes in Denmark, France, Italy and The Netherlands together with ESO. It's a multi wavelength (300-2500nm) medium resolution spectrograph mounted at the UT2 Cassegrain focus.

Ambient conditions for Paranal, including meteorological data, are now available from the ESO archive. The data are produced and provided by the Astronomical Site Monitor (ASM) on Paranal. The ESO archive database contains all available Paranal ambient data from August 17th, 1998 onwards.

The Science Verification observations are part of a very important check of the entire operational procedures and a verification of the scientific status of the VISTA telescope and camera. Furthermore, these observations will provide the first comprehensive self-contained scientific data-sets from VISTA and these data will be immediately made public world-wide. This will allow the entire astronomical community to exploit the data scientifically, as well as provide a basis for planning future observations with VISTA.

Multi-object spectroscopy of faint galaxies in the Chandra Deep Field South (CDFS) has been carried out, as part of the Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey (GOODS), using the VIsible Multi-Object Spectrograph (VIMOS) instrument mounted at the Melipal Unit Telescope of the VLT at ESO's Cerro Paranal Observatory, Chile. The GOODS/VIMOS spectroscopic campaign is part of the ESO/GOODS program in the CDFS, which complements the FORS2 ESO/GOODS spectroscopic campaign.

The service providing raw and master calibration reference files associated with ESO raw science frames is decommissioned as of 24 November 2009.