题目：The Southern African Large Telescope: from Vision to Reality

报告人：David Buckley (South African Astronomical Observatory) 

报告人简介：David Buckley began his professional astronomical career as a Post Doctoral Fellow at UCT in 1988, after completing a PhD at the Australian National University and prior to that, a Masters degree at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, where he grew up. In 1991 he then moved to the South African Astromomical Observatory as a staff astronomer and was subsequently appointed as Project Scientist for the Southern African Large Telescope (SALT) and then first SALT Astronomy Operations Manager and Science Director, until 2015. He is etrrently Principal Investigator on the SALT transient follow-up programme. He is also Lead Investigator for a BRICS astronomy flagship programme and is a Rubin Observatory PI Affiliate for the South African transient programme. His research focuses on multi-wavelength studies of compact binary stars and over his career he hasauthored or co-authored over 370 refereed papers. He holds National Research Rating research rating and in 2021 was inducted as a member of the Academy of Science of South Africa(ASSAf). David has also been involved in various astronomical instrumentation projects over the year, most recently serving as Project Manager for the PRIME wide field IR telescope building construction. He is also involved in helping to establish new facilities on the African continent and supporting human capacity development projects in Africa.

报告摘要：This talk will cover the history of the SALT project, from the initial modest 4-m class concept in the mid-1990s to its eventual realization as a 10-m telescope, the largest in the southern hemisphere, for which construction was completed in 2005. The initial efforts to motivate for the telescope and the attempts to raise support and find partners, eventually leading to the "green light" in 1999, will be described. The remainder of the talk will discuss the design. construction, commissioning and eventual steady-state transition of SALT into a competitive state-of-the-at astronomical facility, producing forefront research. Some highlights of this will be presented in the area of my own research in transient and compact objects. Future SALT science plans will be described plus the recent initiatives to develop intelligent networks of telescopes, in South Africa and on the African continent, aimed to support the increasing demand for automated tramsient followup observations, particularly in the era of the Rubin Observatory's Legncy Survey of Space and Time(LSST).