P. P. Krüger, D. J. Van der Walt
Southern Africa has some of the world's best sites for air Cherenkov
telescopes. South Africa has only one viable site, which is south of Sutherland
and also close to the Southern African Large Telescope (SALT). This site has
very good infrastructure and is easy to access, but only 47% of the night-time
has a cloudless sky usable for observations.
Namibia, which already hosts the H.E.S.S telescope, has a number of potential
sites with much less cloud coverage. The H.E.S.S. site is one of the highest of
these sites at 1840 m a.s.l. with about 64% of the night-time cloudless. It
also has very low night sky background levels and is relatively close (about
100 km) to Windhoek. Moving further away from Windhoek to the south, the cloud
coverage and artificial night sky brightness becomes even less, with the site
at Kuibis (between Keetmanshoop and Luderitz) at 1640 m a.s.l. having clear
night skies 73% of the time. Even though this site seems remote (being 660 km
from Windhoek by road), it is close to the national B4 highway, a railway line,
a power line and an optical fiber line. It is also less than two hours drive
away from a harbour and national airports. The Namibian sites also receive very
little snow, if any, and the wind speeds are less than 50 km/h for more than
90% of the time with maximum wind speeds of around 100 km/h. Seismically the
whole Southern African region is very stable.
View original:
http://arxiv.org/abs/1202.4747
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