Status of flash

FLASH, the FEL user facility at DESY, is operated with an electron beam energy up to 1 GeV corresponding to a photon wavelength down to 6.5 nm. The shutdown in summer 2007 was followed by a three month commissioning and study period. A new run of FEL experiments started in November 2007. The full year 2008 is dedicated to beam operation: about half of the time is scheduled for FEL users, and the rest for accelerator and FEL physics studies. Here we report the present status of FLASH as an FEL user facility.