Astronomy operations with the Southern African Large Telescope (SALT)

SALT is a 10-m class optical telescope located in Sutherland, South Africa, owned by an international consortium and operated in fully queue-scheduled mode by the South African Astronomical Observatory. In this paper we present an update on all observatory performance metrics since the start of full science operations in late 2011, including science time, weather and technical downtime, and time used for planned engineering activities and our new instruments commissioning. We analyze key statistics describing the science output of SALT, the completion fractions of scheduled observations per priority class, and analyze the more than 500 refereed papers to date since first light based on SALT data. We discuss our latest telescope metrics and the results of our analysis of our acquisition times, what steps we are taking to make significant improvements to our metrics, our metrics dashboard and hiring of a new 'salt efficiency software developer'. Some of these projects, along with the latest developments in software, instrumentation and engineering projects, are presented in detail in other SPIE papers. We also highlight that significant effort has also been placed on the improvement of our data reduction pipelines. The SALT refereed paper output has continued to increase steadily at a pace comparable to other large telescopes when counted from the start of science operations and when scaled by the number of telescopes. When scaled by operations costs (where known), SALT is still clearly very cost-effective compared to most other large telescope operations. We also highlight that in terms of citations and impact, SALT again at a comparable level to other large telescopes. We also discuss the exciting arrival of the Near IR spectrograph, which expands the telescope's wavelength range into the NIR, and the addition of a laser frequency comb to calibrate the High Stability mode of our High-Resolution Spectrograph, in line with strategic vision for exoplanet science. We also briefly discuss our plans for SALT as an important component of the SAAO in an "Intelligent Observatory" framework aiming to network a suite of telescopes and instruments on the observing site.