In this talk, I will introduce the observing facilities of the South African Astronomical Observatory (SAAO). The SAAO is the National Facility for Astronomy of the National Research Foundation of South Africa. The premier optical telescope in South Africa is the Southern African Large Telescope (SALT), an international 10m class, segmented, fully queue-scheduled telescope. Since the start of its science operations in 2011, SALT has proven to be very cost effective. The SAAO also has two classically-scheduled telescopes (1.0m and a 1.9m), as well as a host of other guest telescopes, such as LCOGT, IRSF and KMTNet, to which South African researchers also have access.

 

Understanding the transformation of populations in galaxy clusters has been one of the challenges of galaxy evolution over the past several decades.   The extreme environments, especially of the most massive clusters, are known to affect how galaxies evolve such that the populations of local galaxy clusters are very different from those in other environments.   To help understand these populations,  we have performed a detailed study on a type of star bursting galaxies seen predominately at intermediate redshifts in galaxy clusters: luminous compact blue galaxies.   By looking at the distribution, kinematics, and spectral properties of these galaxies, it does appear that we are seeing the final star-burst from the progenitors of dwarf elliptical galaxies that dominate the populations of nearby galaxy clusters.