LaserSETI Opens First Asian Observing Site at AlUla, Saudi Arabia, Expanding Its Global Sky Watch

Two instruments installed on August 19, 2026, at the AlUla Manara ASM Site in northwest Saudi Arabia are now watching the night sky around the clock. The SETI Institute and the Royal Commission for AlUla (RCU) have commissioned both LaserSETI stations. The announcement says they are fully operational and collecting astronomical data.

The milestone has two parts. AlUla becomes the LaserSETI network's first observing site in Asia, and its fifth worldwide. The four existing installations are in California, Hawai'i, Arizona and Puerto Rico. According to the announcement, the new stations turn a plan first announced two years ago into working hardware on the ground.

LaserSETI was conceived by the SETI Institute to keep constant watch over large parts of the sky for very brief flashes of light. The project treats such flashes as possible signs of three things: short-lived cosmic events, unusual astronomical phenomena that conventional surveys might never catch in the act, or, potentially, laser technology originating beyond Earth. The reasoning rests on timing. An event too brief to fall within a scheduled observation can pass unrecorded.

Most telescopes, whether ground-based observatories or survey instruments, concentrate on a single object or a small patch of sky. LaserSETI uses wide-field cameras and diffraction gratings to monitor large areas continuously, recording optical events that standard observing strategies might miss. That is why its designers call it a global observatory rather than a collection of separate telescopes.

Placement matters to that design. Spreading instruments around the world lets the network watch more sky for longer and compare unusual events seen from different places. AlUla's protected dark skies offer good conditions for detecting faint optical phenomena, and its position in Asia reduces the coverage gaps a network confined to the Americas would leave.

Dr. Franck Marchis, Senior Planetary Astronomer and Director of Citizen Science at the SETI Institute, said the instruments are installed, commissioned and observing, and that AlUla gives LaserSETI an important new geographic vantage point. "This is exactly what LaserSETI needs: instruments distributed around the world, observing continuously and together," he said. Eliot Gillum, Director of LaserSETI, said the network was designed from the start as a global observatory, and that every new location improves its ability to monitor the sky continuously and compare observations of unusual events from different parts of the world.

Naif Al Malik, AlUla Manara Executive Program Head, described the commissioning as an important milestone in the collaboration with the SETI Institute. He said connecting AlUla's dark skies to a global observation network creates new opportunities for scientific research, international collaboration and knowledge exchange, and strengthens AlUla's growing role in astronomy.

The stations stem from a partnership between RCU and the SETI Institute announced in August 2024 to support astronomy research, technology, education and public involvement in AlUla. It includes support for developing the AlUla Manara Observatory and installing LaserSETI instruments. The SETI Institute will run and maintain the stations with RCU for three years. AlUla Manara is also working with LaserSETI to customize data outputs for analysis, future research and scientific communications.

The next phase centers on analyzing the data collected and developing further research opportunities and international scientific partnerships. The partnership also covers publication and the use of results in education and public outreach. The announcement describes only the installation and the plan ahead; it reports no detections.