The first data release of the Fornax Deep Survey with VST (FDS, Venhola et al., 2018, A&A, 620, 165) is now available on the ESO archive.

The Next Generation Transit Survey (NGTS) is a ground based exoplanet survey designed to detect Neptune and super-Earth sized planets orbiting around bright stars, using the transit method. The NGTS facility consists of 12 fully-robotic 20 cm f/2.8 telescopes located at the ESO site on Paranal, Chile. Each telescope has a 2.8x2.8 deg² field of view and is equipped with a custom filter with a bandpass of 520-890nm, which increases sensitivity to late-K and early-M stars.

This data release provides 3D data cubes obtained from KMOS, the K-band Multi-Object Spectrograph. The instrument is located at the VLT UT1 telescope and has 24 image slicer Integral Field Units (IFUs) that can be placed independently in the patrol field of 7.2 arcmin diameter. Each IFU has 14 slices with 14 spatial pixels along each slice and a field-of-view of 2.8’’x2.8’’ which gives a spatial resolution of 0.2’’. Spectral resolving power depends on the grating and is between 2000 and 4200. This initial release consists of observations from October 2013 (i.e. start of operations) until February 2020. The content of the release grows with time as new data are being acquired and processed.

Data have been reduced using the KMOS pipeline version 2.7.3 or higher. Data reduction is executed first for each IFU containing an object. It includes sky subtraction, flat fielding, wavelength calibration, flux calibration, and cube reconstruction. Telluric absorption features in the individual cube spectra are corrected. For this, an atmospheric model is fit to the closest-in-time telluric standard star measurement using the molecfit software. This model is scaled with the airmass difference between science observation and standard star measurement and applied to the extracted spectra. Flux calibration is applied using the zero-point measurement from the same standard star, without assessment of the photometric conditions. Note that all standard stars serve both as telluric and as photometric standards.

The KMOS data collection is current to March 2020, when observations were halted because of the Coronavirus-induced lockdown. It will grow again with time as observations will resume, with future processing on a roughly monthly cadence. More details about the KMOS data and their structure are available in the associated Phase 3 data release description.

The KMOS data cubes tagged "KMOS" can be queried and downloaded using the Phase 3 generic query form which provides access to all Phase 3 data, or the Phase 3 spectral data query form with query parameters suited to harvest 3D cube data. KMOS data can be browsed and accessed via the ASP web interface or programmatically.

Version 6 of the ESO Science Data Products standard is now published. It is a complete revision and restructuring of the previously published version available on the ESO Phase 3 web site. It now integrates the information published as separate addenda and in the Phase 3 frequently asked questions also. A major effort has been devoted to improve the readability and clarity of the text. Errors and typos have been corrected. The new version of the standard can be downloaded as PDF document.

The Science Data Products standard specifies the structure and data format that reduced data products must comply with for successful completion of Phase 3 and integration into the ESO archive. The target audience consists of 1) principal investigators and their collaborators who return reduced data products resulting from ESO/non-ESO observations for public release to the astronomical community through the ESO archive, 2) ESO scientists involved in the QC process or in specific reprocessing projects, 3) instruments scientists and pipeline developers for the new and existing ESO instruments, 4) archive users who need to understand the structure and format of the science data products they intend to use for their own science.

The corresponding on-line data verification service to check the compliance of format and provenance with respect to the SDP standard has been updated to version 6. How to access this service from the Release Manager is documented in the Phase 3 instructions. A detailed summary of the implemented checks is available here.

This data release (DR5.1) is based on the observations acquired between February 2010 and October 2016 of 42 VMC survey tiles encompassing the whole Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC), the Magellanic Bridge and the Magellanic Stream components of the survey. The total sky coverage is ~40 deg²  in the SMC, ~ 20 deg²  in the Bridge and ~3 deg²  in the Stream. This release adds reduced and calibrated deep products (co-added tile images and related single band catalogues), together with a multi-band (YJKs) aperture matched, epoch merged source catalogue for more than 14.6 million sources, three multi epoch single band catalogues, a catalogue of variable sources (39406 records) and a PSF photometry catalogue. The total volume of this data release is about 166 Gb.

The data published within the VMC DR5.1 release are produced by the Wide Field Astronomy Unit (WFAU).

The KiDS DR4.1 catalogue is an update of the DR4.0 catalogue which, due to a small bug in the alignment of the mask images during the multi-band catalogue production, has incorrect photometry flags for a small percentage of sources on 196 tiles. Those 196 updated tiles have been provided as KiDS DR4.1.

The ESO Archive Science Portal allows browsing and exploration of archive content using an intuitive interactive user interface that supports iterative queries or by direct database and Virtual Observatory (VO) access using user scripts and VO-aware tools. The latest version, released on 23 April 2020, provides the features and improvements listed below.

During the commissioning runs of MATISSE at VLTI in the second half of 2018 several astronomical targets were observed, in order to assess the scientific capabilities of the instrument and to optimise the observing strategies. This page provides links to selected data obtained during those runs, for both science and calibration targets.

The MUSE Analysis of Gas around Galaxies project (MAGG, ESO programme ID: 197.A-0384, PI: M. Fumagalli) provides the community with high quality VLT/MUSE cubes centered on bright redshift z~3.5 quasars (Lofthouse et al. 2019). These absorbers were discovered in archival high-to-medium resolution spectra of the quasars collected, among others, with UVES and XSHOOTER.

The VISTA Hemisphere Survey (VHS, ESO Programme ID: 79.A-2010, PI R. McMahon) is a wide area - multi band - near infrared survey, which when combined with other VISTA public surveys, will result in the coverage of the whole southern celestial hemisphere (Declination < 0; 20,000 deg²), to a depth 30 times fainter than 2MASS/DENIS in at least two filters (J and Ks), with a minimum exposure time of 60 seconds per filter and a median 5*sigma point source depth of AB = 20.8 and 20.0 in J and Ks filters respectively.