Sutherland and the SALT Telescope

The Southern African Large Telescope Sits On A Karoo Hill Above The Coldest Town In South Africa Because The Skies Here Are Among The Darkest And Steadiest On Earth An Eleven Metre Segmented Mirror That Is The Largest Single Optical Telescope In The Southern Hemisphere, With Daytime Tours Of The Dome And Separate Night Time Stargazing That Uses Smaller Instruments · Sutherland, Northern Cape

Sutherland sits at fifteen hundred metres on the Roggeveld escarpment and is the coldest town in South Africa, which is mentioned on the way into explaining why it matters: the air here is dry, steady and dark, there is almost no settlement for a hundred kilometres in any direction, and the South African Astronomical Observatory put its instruments on a hill fourteen kilometres outside the town because of it. The largest of them is SALT, the Southern African Large Telescope, an eleven-metre segmented mirror that is the biggest single optical telescope in the southern hemisphere. You can tour the dome by day and see the machine, which is enormous and impressive. You cannot look through it - it is a research instrument feeding spectrographs, and the night-time stargazing on offer is a separate booking using smaller telescopes. Both are worth doing and the row is clear they are different things. The Karoo sky from here is the real attraction.

On the Roggeveld escarpment in the Karoo, 350 km north-east of Cape Town, with the observatory on a hill 14 km outside the town, Sutherland, Northern Cape, South Africa

DAYTIME DOME TOURS AND NIGHT-TIME STARGAZING ARE SEPARATE BOOKINGS and must both be arranged ahead - this is a working research facility rather than a visitor attraction, places are limited, and turning up expecting either is how people end up looking at a locked gate. SALT ITSELF IS NOT AN OBSERVING TELESCOPE FOR VISITORS: the daytime tour shows you the dome and the mirror, and the night viewing uses smaller instruments run for the public, usually in the town or at a separate site. Tours do not run on all days. The observatory is fourteen kilometres from Sutherland on a gravel road. Accommodation is guesthouses in the town, which fill at new moon and in school holidays. Sutherland is about four hours from Cape Town via Matjiesfontein, it is the COLDEST TOWN IN SOUTH AFRICA with snow most winters, and it is MALARIA-FREE.

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