Completion of the Southern African Large Telescope

The Southern African Large Telescope (SALT) was completed, on budget, in November 2005, in just under 6 years, and is currently in the middle of its commissioning and performance verification phase, expected to be concluded by early 2007. SALT partners have already been obtaining observations during this shake-down period, and night time hours devoted to science time has slowly risen to 65-75%. Already some scientific results have been obtained and the first SALT science paper accepted for publication. SALT promises to be ideally suited to many survey follow-up programs and indeed for surveys of its own, for which observational cosmology will definitely