Where it all began
When Australia became a strategic partner of the European Southern Observatory my PhD supervisor encouraged our group to actively think about proposal ideas. New telescopes and new instruments implied opportunities for new science. Within my team we came up with a few proposals, ranging from observing galaxy kinematics to investigating odd objects. The thought of submitting a proposal to ESO was quite intimidating as a student, not to mention that we decided to ambitiously ask for about 50 hours in grey/dark time on the VLT. Thanks to team effort, we were granted all the time requested in visitor mode, albeit broken into two runs - 3 nights in June, and 3 nights in August 2018.

In July 2018 I traveled to Cerro Paranal in Chile for half a night in Visitor Mode (VM) with X-Shooter on UT2 of the Very Large Telescope. Usually ESO does not permit VM runs of less than 1 night due to the overheads involved, and we were originally allocated the time in Designated Visitor Mode (dVM). However we were able to make the case for why an observer needed to be present on-site for these observations, so if you feel you have a case then you should contact the Observing Programmes Office. Here are a few more things I learned that you may find helpful when going to Chile to observe: