The introduction to the last newsletter No. 8 dwelled on two questions which related to the progress in the MPG-CSIC agreement and the 3.5m  telescope upgrade project. Both questions have an answer now. The MPG-CSIC agreement to jointly operate Calar Alto for 10 years was signed in November, and on Dec 9th, 2004, the founding documents for the company CAHA A.I.E. (Agrupacion de Interes Economico) were signed in Madrid. The new company will comply with European law and will assume all responsibilities which are related to the operation of the observatory. The company is governed by an Executive Committee with three members each of the Spanish and German consortial partners CSIC and MPG, including the directors of the IAA and the MPIA.

These very good news for Calar Alto are accompanied by pleasant reports from the 3.5m telescope. The telescope works very well after the first phase of the upgrade, and technical down time in the July - December period was 2 %, which is lower than expected after the major technical upgrade of last summer. Two percent! The two articles by Zimmermann, Wolf & Fried, and Mueller, summarise the technical work performed during that first step. Discussions about Phase II of the upgrade are under way and a decision about its final concept will be taken in the near future. It is a pleasure to thank Karl Zimmermann in Heidelberg for his initiative to conclude phase I, and Wolfgang Mueller with his group at Calar Alto for their effort to guarantee the success of the upgrade. 

During the first meeting of the CAHA Exccutive Committee in November 2004, it was decided that an effort should be made to bring back the 1.23m telescope to life. A major overhaul of the telescope support will be carried out by Calar Alto staff during the summer months of 2005. A replacement of the old telescope control system will be carried out by Dr. Wolf. It is then expected that the telescope will be ready again for astronomical observations  towards the end of this year.  Other than the 3.5m and 2.2m telescopes, the 1.23m telescope will not be offered to the general user. Instead, a call for proposals, to be submitted in the near future, will seek to attract long-term programmes to the telesope.

The new agreement and the technical upgrades have put Calar Alto into a position to remain scientifically competitive for the years to come. The success will ultimately be measured by its scientific production rate. Observations on Calar Alto have produced some 86 refereed papers in 2004. It should be in the interest of every potential future user of Calar Alto facilities that our bibliography is complete, and we very much solicit the active help of our user community to add missing papers. Calar Alto will in a few years from now suffer a comprehensive international evaluation. A complete publication list will be an asset then.

The advertisment of the Calar Alto Colloquium in Heidelberg, in April 2005, is under way. As a novelty, Calar Alto has set apart travel funds which are intended to support participants at the Colloquium. This year, those funds will mainly be used to fund Spanish astronomers to travel to Heidelberg. Next year, when the Colloquium will be held in Granada again, the funds will mainly go to Germany. We thus hope to revive the colloquium to its old glory, and use it as a forum to exchange thoughts on operations and the instrumentation programme as well.