The VLT-Survey Telescope (VST) is a 2.6-m optical wide-field telescope installed at the ESO observatory of Cerro Paranal (Chile). The only instrument at the VST is OmegaCAM, which is a wide-field camera, covering 1 square degree in the sky, made of 32-CCDs, 16k x 16k detector mosaic, with 0.21 arcsec per pixel.
On 1st October 2022, after more than 10 years of activity, the INAF-ESO contract expired, and the VST became a hosted telescope at ESO. VST is currently owned and managed by INAF, and a new 5-year (renewable) INAF-ESO agreement was signed to define rules and roles. Since then, operations were shifted to the INAF side and managed by the Coordination Centre for the VST. They can be summarised in the following steps:
- open the calls for proposals for the observing time
- arrange the observing schedule for the data acquisition
- support all users in the data reduction and data release.
One of the planned activities from the Coordination Centre for the VST, is to organise a science workshop every two years of operations. The first science workshop was held in April 2024.
The second VST science workshop will take place at INAF headquarters in Rome, on April 9-10, 2026.
The main goals of this workshop are listed below.
- PIs of the accepted proposals at the VST in P1 to P4 will provide an overview of the project and/or preliminary results.
- Gather feedback from users to improve the VST operations.
- Discussed the planned instrument developments to be implemented at the VST and new possible ideas on this topic.
- The VST team will present the progress report on the operations at VST.
