As a preparation of the meeting, the annual user poll was performed in March 2014. 51 of the 280 German Principal Investigators in the ESO provided list that were asked to fill the poll actually participated in the poll.
A brief summary of issues that were identified in the responses of the German Users to the annual poll or by request from individual users, and were then discussed in the meeting, is given below.
Further infomation about the ESO Users Committee (including several presentations prepared for the last meeting) can be found at the ESO webpages.
In general, the majority of users seems to be very content with the ESO services.
A continuous problem for ESO is to find enough scientists for the OPC proposal evaluation. All users are therefore encouraged to consider whether they could serve on the OPC for one period. Interested persons can send me an e-mail and I will then forward this list to ESO.
One specific point where several users expressed criticism concerns the travel arrangements for visitor mode observations. A lack of flexibility and "many buerocratic processes" are mentioned here, that could be improved.
Concerning the question whether Phase 2 preparation should be made easier by requesting more specific information on the observations already in the Phase 1 proposals, the opinion of most users is that this should not be done. Give the high oversubscription of VLT, it would be a significant waste of time if OBs (or something similar) had to be created already in Phase 1.
Several users expressed concerns because their scientific projects will be affected by the upcoming temporal retirement of CRIRES for 3 years. It should be of high priority to make sure that CRIRES comes back to the VLT as soon as possible after the refurbishment.
The full Minutes of the ESO Users Committee meeting will be published at this website as soon as they are approved.
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