A new educational initiative, «Calar Alto Academy», has taken its first steps during the spring semester of 2007. More than 40 astronomy students from different Spanish universities have had the chance to perform professional observational work at Calar Alto Observatory, including a real observing experience at the telescope and an introduction to astronomical data reduction...

The President of the autonomous community of Andalusia, Mr. Manuel Chaves González, visited on April 20th the Calar Alto Observatory. In this clear and rather cold morning, the President has had the opportunity to get acquainted with the Observatory and its staff...

The most massive stars in the universe die in colossal explosions, supernovae, whose power makes them visible over huge intergalactic distances. But these explosions are much more complex than previously believed. Recent observations made at Calar Alto Observatory zoom in into one of the manifestations of this complexity: the non-spherical shape of these explosions...

Calar Alto releases to the astronomical community the widest integral field spectroscopy mosaic survey of the Great Orion Nebula. This survey constitutes the widest (both spatially and in spectral range) survey ever done of this object, and allows, for the first time, the study of the true integrated properties and complex structure of this canonical, nearest to Earth HII region. The paper presenting these data, by Calar Alto astronomer Sebastián F. Sánchez and collaborators from Spain and the Netherlands, was recently published and highlighted by the European journal Astronomy & Astrophysics on its April 1 issue. Images from the survey appear on the cover of this A&A issue.