Did you know that since the start of Australia's Strategic Partnership with ESO in 2017, Australian astronomers have submitted or been Co-investigators on a total of 638 observing proposals? Or that nearly 40% of these proposals have been successful? Statistics like these are now at the fingertips of AAL thanks to ESOStats, a new database of Australian demand for and usage of ESO time.

There is never a dull moment when you do science with the ESO VLT. In 2018, thanks to ESO and ASTRO3D, I was fortunate while an ANU graduate student to visit the Paranal Observatory, and carry out observations of 69 dwarf galaxies using the FLAMES instrument. FLAMES is a multi-object, intermediate and high resolution spectrograph mounted on UT2 (Kueyen), that can access targets over a field of view 25 arcmin in diameter, allowing the observation of up to 130 targets at a time, or (in our case) to do integral field spectroscopy.