The X-SHOOTER Science Verification (SV2) observations took place between September 26 and 29 2009. The SV observations are being performed in "service mode style" by a dedicated team and the collected data are made available to the whole user community.

On September 9, 2009 NASA held a press conference to highlight Hubble's new instruments and their capabilities and to show that the refurbished instruments are working well and are once again able to provide amazing science data. The Early Release Observations were acquired and used to demonstrate the instruments' capabilities. With the press release these data are now public and available for use by the community. Other data have been released for public use at the time of the press conference. These data include the Early Release Science (ERS) data, and some Treasury program data.

PRIMA is a VLTI facility comprising many subsystems currently under commisioning. More details on the project can be found at the PRIMA Web site.

The X-SHOOTER Science Verification (SV1) observations took place between August 10 and 15 2009. X-SHOOTER SV observations are being performed in "service mode style" by a dedicated team and the collected data are made available to the whole user community.

This release of the X-shooter Commissioning data includes a total of 4594 files collected over 24 nights split in four commissioning periods. The first two commissioning runs were with the UV-B and VIS-R arms only, the 3rd and 4th with the UV-B, VIS-R and NIR arms.

As an ESO PI, you can now retrieve online your raw data while they are still protected under their proprietary period. In addition to the raw science files, the corresponding data package will also contain raw and master calibrations, science data products and ancillary information (processing logs, excerpts from the relevant observing logs, etc). The new service is available as of 29 June 2009. More details can be obtained from the Help Page and the FAQ.

The Data Products department (DPD) at ESO has as one of its tasks the creation and publication of Advanced Data Products (ADPs) into a VO-compliant Science Archive. ADPs are high-level data products, either provided by the astronomical community or created in-house, generally consisting of fully reduced and calibrated imaging and spectroscopic data, ancillary products, catalogues etc. which enable immediate scientific exploitation (see examples here).

As part of the Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey (GOODS), deep imaging in the Chandra Deep Field South (CDF-S) has been carried out, using the VIMOS instrument mounted at the Melipal Unit Telescope of the VLT at ESO's Cerro Paranal Observatory, Chile.

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.