SSO Update

Published in the RSAA Lunations
Vol1 Issue35 1–31 December 2022

GOTO-South

With the weather starting to improve (the past semester was one of the worst semesters for time lost to weather ever recorded at SSO), good progress is now being made at the GOTO-South site.  The concrete platform has been poured and members of the GOTO team will arrive at SSO in early December to erect the domes, which have been in storage at SSO for over a year.  The telescopes will be installed early next year. 

GOTO-South is a twin of the facility that is in the northern hemisphere at the La Palma Observatory. It consists of a pair of wide-field instruments designed to rapidly cover large areas of the sky in a short period of time. UK funding was approved in late 2019 to fully develop the northern node at La Palma Observatory and to deploy a second instrument (GOTO-South) at SSO. GOTO is an international collaboration between the University of Warwick and Monash University. It is anticipated the full network will be operational by April 2023, in time for the start of the 4th Advanced-LIGO/Virgo observing period.

In the photo, one can see the GOTO-South platform in front of the JAXA facility on the right, the APT, which will house DREAMS, in the middle, and the now-empty Uppsala dome on the left. In the background are the LCO telescopes and the UKST.

POLSA

The Polish Space Agency (POLSA) is establishing a network of telescopes across Australia for studies of near-Earth objects. Two of the telescopes will be based at SSO. In the last edition of Lunations, we showed a photo taken of the freshly laid concrete foundation for the telescope.  Here we show a photo of the two telescopes sitting on the concrete foundation. The AAT can be seen in the background. A third POLSA telescope was installed at MSO a week later.

Staff Movements

Over the next couple of months, SSO will be welcoming several new staff members. Beau Brandon will start with us in early December as an electrician. In the new year, Gayandhi De Silva will start as a night assistant, and Ryan Unicomb will join us as  technical assistant.  We wish them all the best in our organisation. Please say hello to them when you meet them for the first time.

Chris Lidman on behalf of the SSO team.