Southern African Large Telescope
Dan Larson addresses the inauguration luncheon

Dan Larson addresses the inauguration luncheon

A little over five years after groundbreaking, South Africa's President Thabo Mbeki officially opened the Southern African Large Telescope (SALT) on November 10 2005. SALT is the largest optical telescope in the southern hemisphere, and equal to the largest in the world. 2005 has been the year when SALT began to reach its potential. In May, technicians installed the last of the 91 1-metre mirrors. On September 1 the SALT team released the first colour images from SALT's imaging camera, SALTICAM. Then, on October 11, the Robert Stobie Spectrograph was installed, the main tool SALT astronomers will use to analyse the light of distant stars and galaxies. At the same time, the final active optics for SALT's primary mirrors was installed, and the final testing started.

SALT Mirror - Can you tell what is different from HET?The seeds for the successful SALT project were planted in 1996 when Frank Bash, then director of McDonald Observatory and chair of the HET board, Larry Ramsey, then HET project scientist and Tom Sebring, then HET project manager, traveled to Pretoria, South Africa to visit Khotso Mokhele, president of South Africa's National Research Foundation. The purpose of the visit was to consult on how South Africa might build a copy of the HET. This path for the future of the South African Astronomical Observatory (SAAO) was initiated by SAAO director Robert Stobie who, sadly, died before his dream could be realized.

Larry Ramsey outside SALT facility as security teams clears for the President MbekiThe current chair of the HET board, Dean Daniel Larson and Larry Ramsey represented the HET joining representatives of the partner institutions on 4 continents who financed and built the new giant telescope (National Research Foundation of South Africa; Nicolaus Copernicus Astronomical Center of the Polish Academy of Sciences and a consortium of 3 Polish universities, comprising: Jagiellonian University, Nicolaus Copernicus University, and Adam Mickiewicz University; The Hobby-Eberly Telescope Board (representing Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Stanford University, The Pennsylvania State University, and The University of Texas at Austin); Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey (USA); Georg-August-Universität Göttingen (Germany); The University of Wisconsin-Madison (USA); University of Canterbury (New Zealand); University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill (USA); Dartmouth College (USA); Carnegie Mellon University (USA); United Kingdom SALT Consortium (UKSC), comprising: the Armagh Observatory, the University of Keele, the University of Central Lancashire, the University of Nottingham, the Open University and the University of Southampton.)