Science with FORS

In September 1998 the first one of the two FORS multimode focal plane instruments for the ESO VLT has been installed at the unit telescope Antu. Test observations of faint objects, such as extragalactic stars, galaxy clusters, gravitational arcs, and high-redshift galaxies and quasars obtained during two commissioning runs and a short science verification period confirm the high optical quality and efficiency of FORS and demonstrate the great potential of FORS and the VLT for imaging, photometry, quantitative spectroscopy, polarimetry and spectropolarimetry.