ESO, Chile. October 10-21, 2022

Even in the era of Large Telescopes with 40m mirrors, most of the objects in the sky will still appear as point-like sources. Combining the light of different apertures in a virtual telescope is the easiest (and cheapest) way to gain angular resolution and thus to resolve details out of the reach of Extremely Large Telescopes (ELT), such as a stellar surface, the torus of Active Galactic Nuclei, the flares near the black hole in the centre of our own galaxy, the very inner scales of protoplanetary discs… and even exo-planets.

ESO's Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI) is the state of the art of Infrared Interferometry. With its second-generation instruments (PIONIER, GRAVITY, MATISSE) and undergoing an upgrade to extend the capabilities to faint sources (i.e., many more scientific topics and targets), the VLTI will play a key-role in the ELT era and beyond 2030. At the same time, the VLTI has a vast unexplored data archive calling for data mining.

The predominantly hands-on workshop "VLTI-HOW" aims at training a new generation of scientists from Chile and Latin American countries on how to access, analyze, and use VLTI data for their research projects. The curriculum will also cover topics important for career development such as proposal and grant writing, job hunting, and work ethics.

Young researchers and scientists from Latin America will get an opportunity to analyze data from the above instruments and to use different software packages for analyzing the interferometric data. This will enable them to carry out their own projects using the VLTI once they have returned to their home institutes and hence result in an increase in research activities in the field of high-resolution imaging and interferometry. Moreover, the workshop will encourage new scientific collaborations across nations. The meeting may also bring in new ideas/proposals to improve future observational facilities.