GENERAL NEWS

  • The SALT Annual Report 2023 (also available as a high resolution pdf) includes science highlights, an introduction to the SALT partners, operations news and feedback on outreach & education....

  • The SALT Annual Report 2022 (also available as a high resolution pdf) includes science highlights, an introduction to the SALT partners, operations news and feedback on outreach & education....

  • The SALT Annual Report 2021 (also available as a high resolution pdf) includes science highlights, an introduction to the SALT partners, operations news and feedback on outreach & education....

  • The SALT Annual Report 2020 (also available as a high resolution pdf) includes science highlights, an introduction to the SALT partners, operations news and feedback on outreach & education....

  •   At their November 2019 meeting in India, the SALT Board commissioned a study to explore the feasibility of pursuing the development of the SALT mini-tracker concept. The study report, along......

  • SALT’s Stategic Objectives The brochure outlines SALT’s strategic objectives ranging from enabling world-class science to driving human capital development....

  • What does multi-wavelength observations mean? The illustration above shows our own galaxy in a variety of wavelengths. See the descriptions in the top right of each individual image to know......

  • Spectroscopy is the most important tool for an astronomer. It unlocks the hidden characteristics of objects too remote to be studied directly – things like the chemical composition of stars, the temperature, pressure and motion of interstellar gas clouds, the structure and mass of galaxies, and much more....

  • Image: an RBG image of NGC 1365 created by Dr Marissa Kotze, taken using SALT. Images with telescopes are taken in various filters and are then combined to create colour......

  •   On a clear dark night, the view of the night sky from Sutherland is spectacular. An arch of light known as the Milky Way stretches overhead. This is the......

  •   Novae are stellar explosions that take place in binary stellar systems. During these explosions, the star’s brightness increases by many orders of magnitude, and then fades to its initial......

  •   A bright Supernova (SN) candidate was detected by an automated SN survey called ASAS-SN using a small automated telescope in Chile in the morning of Sep 21st.  The new......

  •   A supernova, a star that just ended its life in an explosion, was discovered yesterday (Feb 8, 2016) in a nearby galaxy known as Centaurus A.  The galaxy is......

  •   What does SAMS mean? SAMS is an acronym for the SALT Array Management System. It comprises a set of sensors mounted on the mirror segments connected to racks of......

  •   What is accretion? The broadest description of accretion is this: Material falls onto an object. But of course, if that were the full story, throngs of astronomers would be......

  •   HRS is the High Resolution Spectrograph used at SALT. It can observe faint objects with extremely high accuracy, and thus can be used for most, if not all, kinds......

  •   “Two Russians, a Finn, and a Jew come into a bar” seems like the beginning of a joke. In fact, it is really “two South Africans, a Russian and......

  •   Imagine getting an observation with a 10m class telescope done from anywhere in the world… It’s not as far-fetched as it may sound. Remote observing gives astronomers the opportunity to......

  • In Memorium Darragh O’Donoghue was a truly remarkable man and an extremely talented scientist. He contributed enormously to astronomy, South Africa and, most profoundly, to the lives of his many......

  •   Stars are massive bodies – the sun, which is a middle of the road dwarf star, has a mass of 2 billion billion billion tons. The crushing weight of......

  •   At the heart of all planetary nebulae is a star hot enough to ionise the gaseous envelope that we see, usually a white dwarf. Curiously, some planetary nebulae only......

  •   I wonder what James Dunlop was thinking when he stumbled across one particular nebula with his telescope from suburban Sydney in 1826. In the fledgling colonial Australian city, far......

  •   The MASTER-SAAO robotic optical transient detection system consisting of two 0.4m telescopes. Following the installation of the robotic MASTER SAAO optical transient detection system in December 2015, some 27......

  • The first image of Comet C/2015 G2 MASTER taken by the MASTER-SAAO telescope on 8 April 2015. The image was produced from adding together four exposures taken in different coloured......