Under the arrangements for our strategic partnership with the European Southern Observatory, Australia has two observers on the ESO Council: I'm one and Jane Urquhart from the Department of Industry is the other. The Council is ESO’s ruling body and has two representatives from each Member State, usually one government representative and one astronomer. Since ESO now has 16 Member States (plus one strategic partner), that means ESO Council meetings require a big room and a big table!

Earlier this year I was lucky enough to be one of just 7 students selected from a field of almost 350 applicants worldwide to be part of the first cohort of ESO Summer Research Students. This new program provides the opportunity for students who have yet to commence a PhD to spend 6 weeks in the European summer working alongside ESO astronomers on a research project at their headquarters in Garching, Germany.

ESO’s VLT in 2030 workshop in June provided a unique opportunity for the broad ESO community to prevent their vision for the world’s most productive observatory in a broad scientific context. Big picture context talks ranged from the solar system (Heike Rauer) through to Cosmology (Matthew Colless), with arguably the most relevance, interest and excitement in the areas of exoplanet formation, resolving stellar populations in galaxies including the Milky Way, and extragalactic astrophysics including AGN feedback.

Dear fellow Australian astronomers, 
 
This is a hopefully thorough update from your ESO Users Committee (UC) representative. My role is to represent Australian ESO Users and act as a capillary link between ESO and the Australian community.

It was my pleasure to start as the new director of the AAO node at Macquarie University on April 29th after being non-resident in Australia for more than 30 years.  Following a PhD at the University of Melbourne, I began my working career at the Joint Astromomy Centre (JAC) in Hilo, Hawaii, then the old Royal Observatory in Edinburgh which later became the UKATC and latterly, a long stint of 14 years at ESO headquarters in Munich where I was variously head of instrumentation and later technology development.

Recently I attended the VLT in 2030 meeting at ESO headquarters in Garching, outside of Munich in Germany. While there I took the opportunity to extend my stay by a few days to allow time for discussions with key ESO personnel about enhancing Australia's Strategic Partnership. For those who have not yet visited the ESO "mothership", here are some thoughts about what you can expect.

ESO collects feedback from its users in a number of ways:

• All observers in Visitor Mode to La Silla or Paranal are required to fill out an “End of Mission” report.
  
• Annual user satisfaction campaigns targeting selected PIs in Service Mode.
• Member state representatives on the ESO Users Committee actively solicit feedback from their communities prior to each UC meeting.
  

In order to properly measure the impact that the ESO Strategic Partnership is having across a range of outputs including collaboration, public outreach, leveraging grants, etc., AAL conducts annual Australian ESO User Surveys, targeting the Principal Investigators who were allocated ESO time in the two most recently completed Periods.

La Silla Observatory is located in the Chilean Atacama Desert, one of the driest and most remote areas of the world, 150 km northeast of La Serena and at an altitude of 2400 metres. Whoever is lucky enough to visit this observatory immediately realises that it is a gem of astronomy, home to some of the telescopes that have made the history of this field.

This is a quick update from your Users Committee (UC) representative. My role is to represent Australian ESO users and act as the capillary link between ESO and the Australian community.

First, congratulations to all those who have been awarded ESO time for P103 and have completed their Phase 2s last week. Now let’s hope for lots of good quality photons!

Between June 17 and 21 this year, an exciting, rare and strategic meeting will take place in Garching on The VLT in 2030. The existing complement of VLT/I instrumentation was largely defined a decade or more ago, with no new instruments approved in the past 5 years. The long term future of the observatory is uncertain, with a range of possible changes to instrumentation and operations.