The partners of the MeerLICHT project met on Friday 28 November 2014 at the Astronomy Department at UCT to sign the Memorandum of Understanding, marking the formal start of the project. The MeerLICHT project pioneers an innovative way of providing real-time optical counterparts to radio transients discovered with the MeerKAT radio telescope array, by building a small optical telescope that will be permanently tied to the observing schedule of MeerKAT. The telescope is expected to see first light in 2015 and will be housed at the Sutherland station of the South African Astronomical Observatory.

The MeerLICHT partners are: the University of Cape Town (SA), Radboud University Nijmegen (NL), the South African Astronomical Observatory/NRF (SA), the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) and Oxford University. The partners were formally represented by Prof Ted Williams (Director, SAAO), Dr Louis Vertegaal (Director NWO-EW, NL), Prof Danie Visser (DVC research, UCT), Dr Marc Klein-Wolt (project manager MeerLICHT/BlackGEM, RU Nijmegen), and Prof Rob Fender (PI ThunderKAT/MeerLICHT, Oxford) - from left to right in the associated photograph on this page.