Southern Africa CTA Site Proposal

TL;DR

This paper evaluates potential sites in Southern Africa for air Cherenkov telescopes, highlighting Namibia's remote sites with high clear night sky percentages, good infrastructure, and favorable environmental conditions.

Contribution

It identifies and compares multiple Southern African sites, emphasizing Namibia's Kuibis site as a promising location for future Cherenkov telescope installation.

Findings

Kuibis site has 73% clear nights.

Namibian sites have low light pollution and wind speeds.

Region is seismically stable.

Abstract

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.