Tour of South African Large Telescope (SALT)
The Southern African Large Telescope (SALT) in the southern hemisphere is the largest optical/infrared telescope which is located in the Northern Cape in Sutherland, South Africa. The SALT instrument facilitates a 10-m class telescope with a fixed-altitude spherical primary mirror system for optical/infrared astronomy. The design of SALT is based on the first adopted Hobby-Eberly telescope (HET) in McDonald Observatory, Texas, USA. The SALT design is a tilted Arecibo concept with a segmented spherical primary mirror array of 11m in diameter, composed of 91 individual 1m hexagonal mirrors.
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Blaine Lomberg
Blaine Lomberg studied Physics from 2005-2008 at the University of the Western Cape. In 2009, he completed an Honours Degree specializing in Nuclear Physics. In 2010, Blaine joined the Accelerator and Engineering Group at iThemba Labs, where he worked on ion source physics focusing on a diagnostic device for ion beam quality measurements. His Master’s thesis was titled, “Studies of an emittance measurement device for beam quality optimisation of ion sources”. From September 2012 -2015, Blaine joined oPAC (optimization of the performance of any Particle Accelerator - FP7 Marie Curie Initial Training Network (ITN) scheme) an EU Consortium as a Marie Curie Fellow and was jointly based at the Cockcroft Institute for Accelerator Science in Daresbury and the University of Liverpool, UK. During his fellowship, Blaine developed advance R&D technology for novel optical instrumentation for particle accelerator diagnostic applications.
In July 2016, Blaine joined the SAAO as a PDP (Professional Development Program) fellow, with his research aimed on developing novel instrumentation for observational astronomy; specially focussing on studying exoplanets such as ringed system’s similar to Saturn. His interest includes adaptive optics and optimising imaging systems for overcoming the limitations of conventional telescopes used today. Within the NRF-SAAO collaboration, Blaine is a PhD student with the University of Cape Town working with Dr. Steve Crawford and co-supervision by Prof. Patricia Whitelock.
In addition, Blaine enjoys blogging, being active in student outreach, disseminating science and his research to the public and local communities.
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