South Africa has launched its first automated optical telescope in the Northern Cape, the headquarters of the country's space exploration project. The Meerlicht optical telescope could soon help unravel the mysteries of the universe, beginning with a closer look at the vast African skies. Engineers say the Meerlicht will offer astronomers an unprecedented view of the stars. Optical telescopes work by detecting visible light in space – and this one will be used alongside a radio telescope. Together, they will give a real-time image of the solar system at night. Meerlicht is a completely robotic instrument and, at 110 million pixels, is the largest scientific CCD camera that can be made. In a top-end smartphone, a 20-megapixel camera can produce a 2.45Mb compressed image, and at 110 megapixels, a compressed image could come in at 22Mb. The uncompressed images from the Meerlicht, however, come in at 350Mb, include positional data and up to one million stars per image, making for superb study data. Unlike its bigger brother SALT (Southern African Large Telescope), the Meerlicht is meant to give astronomers a large field of view and match observations with the MeerKAT. While SALT conducts spectroscopy – analysing light in different segments – Meerlicht conducts all its investigations in the visible light spectrum. This latest development is part of the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) project - which once completed will be the largest telescope in the world – the size of about 200 football fields. The SKA will have antennas in South Africa, New Zealand and Australia and is expected to change space exploration as we know it. CGTN Africa