4MOST All Hands Meeting 2026

by James Munday on 2026-06-15

On the week 1-5 June 2026, over 120 4MOST members gathered in person at the Leibniz-Institut für Astrophysik Potsdam (AIP) for the 4MOST All Hands meeting.

The operations team, the software and data management team, representatives from the European Southern Observatory (ESO), instrument engineers and members of various science working groups came together to review the enormous amount of progress that has occurred over recent months. Various improvements and adjustments in the instrument itself, but mainly in the software packages driving the observations, have been carried out by the operations team working at the VISTA telescope in Paranal, Chile, along with the inauguration and commissioning of 4MOST.

The All Hands conference also marked the first project-wide gathering since 4MOST achieved first light more than 6 months ago. One particularly encouraging result is that 4MOST has proven far more stable than originally anticipated, reducing the need for as many night-time calibration images, which in turn improves the expected main survey performance by up to 20%. Since the previous collaboration meeting, the 4MOST mission has also progressed from the commissioning phase into Survey Programme Validation (SPV). A total of 76 nights worth of SPV data presented the scientific work groups the opportunity to inspect the data quality of 4MOST and exploit the various pipelines that have been built to automatically analyse data. Impressive new results were shown from the galactic and extra-galactic working groups, on top of discussion on small improvements that should be carried before 4MOST's main survey commences.

The meeting concluded by outlining the future services that will provide access to 4MOST for consortium members and, ultimately, the wider community (namely the 4PA system). All working groups within 4MOST described their upcoming plans to optimise survey performance and scientific output, ready for the imminent start of 4MOST's main survey.