Aries Training School in Observational Astronomy (ATSOA) 2018

The 10 days of ARIES Training School in Observational Astronomy (ATSOA) were packed with many activities. Every day we used to have three or four lectures and then data analysis sessions. During these sessions, we first learned about image cleaning i.e. Bias subtraction, Flat correction etc. Different operating systems like Linux, Fedora, and software called IRAF was installed in laptops by guides of each group. At ARIES every computer already had this software so we first tried to practice the image cleaning commands on them. Meanwhile, we also visited different telescopes at ARIES and Devasthal.

Day 2 - A visit to Solar Telescope

Day 6 - A visit to Devasthal telescopes 

1. (3.6m) Devasthal Optical Telescope.
                

  

2. (130 cm) Telescope

3. Liquid Mirror Telescope

Day 7 - A visit to Nainital

Day 10 - Project presentation. The project of our group was to do photometry of star-forming region Sh2-305. Its part of the second catalog made by astronomer Stewart Sharpless that's why the name.

The image we used was taken by Himalayan Chandra Telescope's TIRSPEC instrument, the TIFR infrared spectrometer, an imager which has 1 Mega Pixel CCD.

The data from that telescope was already dark subtracted so we started the cleaning process by making master flat. Then we subtracted the sky image from the raw image and divided it by master flat which gave us the cleaned image.

I happened to click a picture of the computer screen when we were practicing the commands in IRAF.

Next task was to do processing to get the instrumental magnitude of stars. For this, we did aperture photometry using different commands in IRAF. Then to get the standard magnitude of all-stars we did calibration and astrometry which again involved many commands in IRAF.