ESO DOI Service

• Petr-Gotzens, Monika G. [European Southern Observatory (ESO)]
• Häußler, Boris [European Southern Observatory (ESO)]

A decade of targeted wide-field imaging at ESO was coming to an end in early 2023, when the near-infrared imager VIRCAM at the Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy was decommissioned. Shortly before, in October 2022, the optical wide-field imager OmegaCAM at the VLT Survey Telescope had become a hosted telescope after many years of being an ESO-operated optical survey machine. The two instruments were largely dedicated to public imaging surveys, which have amassed a total of nearly 60 000 hours of telescope time. To commemorate these milestones, ESO organised a five-day workshop in October 2023 to review the legacy left by these instruments, to summarise the variety of scientific impacts that the imaging surveys have had on a wide range of research topics in astronomy, and to encourage new ideas from/within the community to enlarge the exploitation of the high-quality VIRCAM and OmegaCAM survey data.