0.50m telescope This reflector was originally built for the
Republic Observatory in 1967, but was moved to the Sutherland site in 1972. It is no longer in use. The 20" telescope was replaced with the Meerlicht telescope. The 20" telescope was relocated to the
University of Freestate Boyden observatory and commissioned in ~2019.
0.75m telescope A
Grubb Parsons reflector.
1.0m Telescope This telescope was originally located at SAAO Head office in
Observatory, Cape Town, but has since moved to the Sutherland site. This telescope participates in the
PLANET network.
1.9m Telescope The Radcliffe Telescope was commissioned for the
Radcliffe Observatory in
Pretoria where it was in use between 1948 and 1974. Following the closure of the Radcliffe Observatory it was moved to
Sutherland where it became operational again in January 1976. Between 1951 and 2004 it was the largest telescope in South Africa. The telescope was manufactured by
Sir Howard Grubb, Parsons and Co.
Alan Cousins Telescope (ACT) This telescope was originally called the Automatic Photometric Telescope, but has been renamed the Alan Cousins Telescope in honour of
Alan William James Cousins.
BiSON One of six telescopes in the
Birmingham Solar Oscillations Network.
Infrared Survey Facility (IRSF) The IRSF is a reflector fitted with a 3-colour infrared imager. Originally built as part of the
Magellanic CloudsA Thorough Study grant from the
Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology in 2000. Other studies the telescope participated in include: • The Indian
Department of Space used this telescope for the
Near Infrared Survey of the Nuclear Regions of the Milky Way to improve on data from the
DENIS and
2MASS Astronomical surveys.
Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network Three telescopes to form part of the LCOGT network were installed in early 2013.
MASTER The
MASTER-SAAO Telescope (obs. code:
K95) is part of the
Russian Mobile Astronomical System of Telescope-Robots. It saw first light on 21 December 2014. In April 2015 it discovered the first
comet from South Africa in 35 years,
C/2015 G2 (MASTER).
MONET One of the two telescopes of the
MOnitoring NEtwork of Telescopes Project is located at Sutherland. Its twin can be found at the
McDonald Observatory in Texas. The MONET telescopes are
Robotic telescope controllable via the Internet and was constructed by the
University of Göttingen.
PRIME PRime-focus Infrared Microlensing Experiments is a telescope located in Sutherland. PRIME achieved first light on October 8, 2022. Currently PRIME has a
near-infrared camera located in its prime focus with a 1.29-square-degree field of view. The telescope is a collaboration between
Osaka University,
University of Maryland, South African Astronomical Observatory,
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and
Astro-Biology Center. The project's primary science objective is the study of exoplanets using
gravitational microlensing.
Project Solaris Two telescopes forming part of
Project Solaris is located at the Sutherland site.
Solaris-1 and
Solaris-2 are both 0.5m f/15
Ritchey–Chrétien telescopes. The aims of Project Solaris is to detect
circumbinary planets around
eclipsing binary stars and to characterise these binaries to improve stellar models.
Southern African Large Telescope (SALT) :
Observatory Code: B31 :
Observations: (Near Earth Objects) SALT was inaugurated in November 2005. It is the largest single optical telescope in the Southern Hemisphere, with a hexagonal mirror array 11 meters across. SALT shares similarities with the
Hobby-Eberly Telescope (HET) in Texas. The Southern African Large Telescope gathers twenty-five times as much light as any other existing African Telescope. With this larger mirror array, SALT can record distant
stars,
galaxies and
quasars.
SuperWASP-South The
Wide Angle Search for Planets consists of two
robotic telescopes, one located at SAAO
Sutherland and the other at
Roque de los Muchachos Observatory on the island of
La Palma in the
Canaries.
WASP-17b, the first
exoplanet known to have a
retrograde orbit, was discovered in 2009 using this array.
KELT-South KELT-South (
Kilodegree Extremely Little TelescopeSouth) is a small robotic telescope that is designed to detect transiting extrasolar planets. The telescope is owned and operated by
Vanderbilt University and was based on the design of KELT-North, which was conceived and designed at the
Ohio State University, Department of Astronomy. The KELT-South telescope will serve as a counterpart to its northern twin, surveying the southern sky for transiting planets over the next few years.
MeerLICHT :
Observatory Code: Optical wide-field telescope, installed in 2017. It has a effective aperture, and a 1.65-×-1.65-degree field-of-view, sampled at 0.56"/pix. It was designed and manufactured in the Netherlands (
Radboud University & NOVA) and is run by a consortium of Radboud University, University of Cape Town, the NRF/SAAO, the University of Oxford, the University of Manchester, and the University of Amsterdam. It is the optical eye of
MeerKAT, and has as its main-purpose to twin with the MeerKAT radio array to achieve a simultaneous optical-radio coverage of the southern skies. It is the prototype of the BlackGEM array, installed at
ESO La Silla in Chile.
Yonsei Survey Telescopes for Astronomical Research (YSTAR) :
Observatory Code: The
Yonsei Survey Telescopes for Astronomical Research (
YSTAR), decommissioned in 2012, was used for the monitoring of variable stars and other transient events. YSTAR was a joint project between SAAO and the
Yonsei University,
Korea.
Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) The ATLAS asteroid impact early warning system, developed by the University of Hawaii and funded by NASA, consists of 4 telescopes; South Africa hosts ATLAS-Sutherland. In February 2023, the telescope observed the comet
C/2023 A3 (Tsuchinshan–ATLAS). == Geophysical ==