Astronomy operations with the Southern African Large Telescope (SALT)

Encarnacion Romero-Colmenero; Petri Väisänen; Danièl Groenewald; Christian Hettlage; Alexei Kniazev; Rudolph Kuhn; Moses Mogotsi; Enrico Kotze; Marissa Kotze; Rosalind Skelton; Lee Townsend; Thea Koen; Veronica Van Wyk; Fred Marang; Anja Schroeder; Nhlavutelo Macebele; Lonwabo Zaula; Sifiso Myeza

doi:10.1117/12.2562318

13 December 2020 Astronomy operations with the Southern African Large Telescope (SALT)

Encarnacion Romero-Colmenero, Petri Väisänen, Danièl Groenewald, Christian Hettlage, Alexei Kniazev, Rudolph Kuhn, Moses Mogotsi, Enrico Kotze, Marissa Kotze, Rosalind Skelton, Lee Townsend, Thea Koen, Veronica Van Wyk, Fred Marang, Anja Schroeder, Nhlavutelo Macebele, Lonwabo Zaula, Sifiso Myeza

Author Affiliations +

Proceedings Volume 11449, Observatory Operations: Strategies, Processes, and Systems VIII; 114490E (2020) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2562318
Event: SPIE Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation, 2020, Online Only

Abstract

SALT is a 10-m class optical telescope located in Sutherland, South Africa, owned by an international consortium and operated in fully queue-scheduled mode by the South African Astronomical Observatory. In this paper we present an update on all observatory performance metrics since the start of full science operations in late 2011, including science time, weather and technical downtime, and time used for planned engineering activities and commissioning. We analyze key statistics describing the science output of SALT, the completion fractions of scheduled observations and programs per priority class, and analyze the more than 260 refereed papers since the start of operations in 2011 until the end of 2019. We further discuss 2020, the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on our metrics, and the resulting, successful move to full remote operations since May 2020. The SALT refereed paper has continued along a similar trend to other 6-10 m observatories (when scaled by the number of telescopes). When scaled by operations costs (where known), SALT is still clearly very cost-effective compared to most other large telescope operations. It is interesting to note that, while our main workhorse instrument, the RSS spectrograph, still produces the largest number of papers and dominates our best conditions queue (i.e. dark time, best seeing, photometric conditions), with the arrival of the high-resolution data reduction pipeline at the end of 2016, the HRS is now used ~40% of the time and is our main instrument during bright Moon and poorer conditions. Spectropolarimetry continues to be widely. Our Fabry- Pérot system is undergoing repairs and it is hoped it will be back online in the latter part of 2021. We also briefly discuss our upcoming instrumentation and facility developments and show SALT's near- and long-term exciting future.

Conference Presentation

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Encarnacion Romero-Colmenero, Petri Väisänen, Danièl Groenewald, Christian Hettlage, Alexei Kniazev, Rudolph Kuhn, Moses Mogotsi, Enrico Kotze, Marissa Kotze, Rosalind Skelton, Lee Townsend, Thea Koen, Veronica Van Wyk, Fred Marang, Anja Schroeder, Nhlavutelo Macebele, Lonwabo Zaula, and Sifiso Myeza "Astronomy operations with the Southern African Large Telescope (SALT)", Proc. SPIE 11449, Observatory Operations: Strategies, Processes, and Systems VIII, 114490E (13 December 2020); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2562318

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