Thursday 15 June at 2:30pm

David Buckley & Kobus Meiring - South African Astronomical Observatory

"The Southern African Large Telescope (SALT): current status"

ABSTRACT: "Over the next 5 years or so, South Africa plans to build a 10 m class telescope -- the Southern African Large Telescope (SALT) -- modelled closely on the novel design of the Hobby-Eberly Telescope (HET) in west Texas. These telescopes represent new paradigms in design, at 20% of the cost of conventional telescopes. SALT will be operated as a queue-scheduled telescope and is primarily designed for spectroscopic observations. The current status of the project will be reviewed. We discuss the main characteristics of SALT and the major science drivers, both of which will decide the choice of a first-light instrument package. Design changes (e.g. mirror coatings with better blue performance, a spherical aberration corrector with larger field and better image quality) mean that SALT will have twice as big a field as the HET (8 armin diameter, will have improved imaging capabilty, and will perform better in the blue (<400 nm). First-light instruments will take full advantage of these improvements, and the top priority instrument for is a Prime Focus Imaging Spectrograph (PFIS), an instrument designed to have high blue throughput (capable to 320 nm), multi-object slits (30-90), and resolutions of 500-13,000 using VPH gratings. A high resolution (R = 30,000-100,000) fibre-fed echelle spectrograph, possibly with modest multi-object or IFU capability, will complete the first-light instrument suite for SALT."