Related papers: ESO's Exposure Time Calculator 2.0

EFOSC2 (the European Southern Observatory Faint Object Spectrograph and Camera v2) is one of the workhorse instruments on ESO's New Technology Telescope (NTT), and is one of the most popular instruments at La Silla observatory. It is…

The VST (VLT Survey Telescope) is a 2.6 m Alt-Az telescope to be installed at Mount Paranal in Chile, in the European Southern Observatory (ESO) site. The VST is a wide-field imaging facility planned to supply databases for the ESO Very…

The FORS2 instrument is one of the most widely used and productive instruments on the Very Large Telescope. This article reports on a project to improve the quality of the reduced FORS2 spectra that can be produced with the software…

The Maunakea Spectroscopic Explorer (MSE) project will provide multi-object spectroscopy in the optical and near-infrared bands using an 11.25-m aperture telescope, repurposing the original Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope (CFHT) site. MSE…

Gen TSO is a noise calculator specifically tailored to simulate James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) time-series observations of exoplanets. Gen TSO enables the estimation of signal-to-noise ratios (S/N) for transit or eclipse depths through…

A new detector controller, NGCII, is in development for the first-generation instruments of the ELT as well as new instruments for the VLT. Building on experience with previous ESO detector controllers, a modular system based on the…

The VLT Survey Telescope (VST) is a 2.6m aperture, wide field, UV to I facility, to be installed at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) on the Cerro Paranal Chile. VST was primarily intended to complement the observing capabilities of…

A comprehensive description of ESO in the current global astronomical context, and its plans for the next decade and beyond, are presented. This survey covers all aspects of the Organisation, including the optical-infrared programme at the…

Preparing observing proposals is a classical exercise in an observational astronomer's life. In this paper, we summarize the general requirements to write a good proposal for the ESO telescopes, and eventually obtain telescope time. We…

The ESO Imaging Survey (EIS) is an ongoing project to carry out public imaging surveys to support programs on the ESO Very Large Telescope (VLT). The first phase of the project started in July 1997 and consisted of a moderately deep,…

We present an exposure-time calculator (ETC) for the Immersion Grating Infrared Spectrograph (IGRINS). The signal and noise values are calculated by taking into account the telluric background emission and absorption, the emission and…

The European Solar Telescope (EST) is a project of a new-generation solar telescope. It has a large aperture of 4~m, which is necessary for achieving high spatial and temporal resolution. The high polarimetric sensitivity of the EST will…

ESPRESSO is the new high-resolution spectrograph of ESO's Very-Large Telescope (VLT). It was designed for ultra-high radial-velocity precision and extreme spectral fidelity with the aim of performing exoplanet research and fundamental…

The SKA Observatory, currently in the construction phase, will have two of the world's largest radio telescopes when completed in 2028. The scale of the project introduces unique challenges for the telescope software design and…

This paper presents the preliminary results of the ESO Imaging Survey (EIS), a public survey being carried out by ESO and member states, in preparation for the VLT first-light. The survey goals, organization, strategy and observations are…

The visual STELLA echelle spectrograph (SES-VIS) is a new instrument for the STELLA-II telescope at the Iza\~na observatory on Tenerife. Together with the original SES spectrograph - which will still be used in the near IR - and a new…

The EAGLE instrument is a Multi-Object Adaptive Optics (MOAO) fed, multiple Integral Field Spectrograph (IFS), working in the Near Infra-Red (NIR), on the European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT). A Phase A design study was delivered to…

We present the advancements in the development of the scheduler for the Son Of X-shooter instrument at the ESO-NTT 3.58-m telescope in La Silla, Chile. SOXS is designed as a single-object spectroscopic facility and features a…

The OTELO project is the extragalactic survey currently under way using the tunable filters of the OSIRIS instrument at the GTC. OTELO is already providing the deepest emission line object survey of the universe up to a redshift 7. In this…

In this contribution we present the most relevant results obtained in the context of a feasibility study (MOSE) undertaken for ESO. The principal aim of the project was to quantify the performances of a mesoscale model (Astro-Meso-NH code)…