Proposal Summary

SALT received 176 proposals asking for a total of 1888 hours from only 662 hours being available. The proposals included 317 different investigators from 21 different countries spread over 88 different institutions. The first proposal in was from Mathew Schurch from University of Cape Town and the last official entry was from Brent Miszalski at SAAO--submitted just 5 seconds prior to the deadline.

The proposals asked a wide range of science questions: From looking at near-earth asteroids to high redshift galaxies. Over 45% of the proposals were asking to look at stars or other stellar sources, 60% of the proposals were looking at sources in our own galaxy or its satellites, and the remaining proposals were looking at extragalactic sources. Of the proposals, we have two looking at asteroids in the solar system, 12 looking at white dwarf stars, 21 looking at binary stars, 7 looking at different types of nebula, and over 30 proposals investigating black holes in either our own galaxy or others. In addition, we have 9 proposals looking at sueprnova, 11 proposals researching AGN, 11 looking at galaxy clusters, and 6 were looking at galaxies when the Universe was only a few billion years old.

The telescope allocation committees at each partner have now done their job and awarded time to the proposals for the coming semester. The notifications have been sent out and it is now on to the next stage of the process where investigators of successful proposals will complete the details of their observations and prepare for the coming semester.