Optical Astronomy

In CBSS, the primary facilities used in optical astronomy research are 25cm Meade Cassegrain- Schmidt optical telescope, 10cm comet-hunter reflecting telescope and a 60cm optical telescope donated by KIAM-RAS Russia (Yet to be delivered and installed). Current research areas are long-term study of variable stars and asteroids light curves using the 25cm Meade telescope driven by an equatorial mount and equipped with a SBIG ST-7E CCD camera. The telescopes are also used in an outreach setting to observe very close bright extended objects such as planets, comets, nebulae and galaxies.

 

The CBSS 25cm Meade Cassegrain-Schmidt optical telescope housed in a 3m-diameter dome (Left) and 10cm comet-hunter reflecting telescope (Right)

Solar Astronomy

Imaging and monitoring of solar phenomena such as solar flares, sunspots, solar prominences and and granulation. The telescope used is a 10cm H-Alpha Solar Telescope by the manufacturer “Lunt Solar System” and is equipped with a CCD Camera, ZWO ASI120MM.

 

The CBSS 10cm H-Alpha Solar Telescope

Experimental Radio Astronomy

Experiments involving small radio telescopes (SRT) that offer students, researchers and amateur radio astronomers a great opportunity to acquaint themselves with techniques used in radio astronomy observation, data acquisition and analysis. Design and construction of low cost and effective antennas and receiver system used in these SRTs with design and functionality that look similar to professional telescopes except that dish size and sensitivity are more restricted.

Antenna types include parabolic dish, dipole, Yagi-Uda and pyramidal horn. For the parabolic dishes, we have a fully steerable mesh dish of diameter of 3m used for undergraduate and graduate teaching, three solid dishes of diameter of 2m used as a phased array interferometer to demonstrate the techniques of interferometer, locally made solid dishes of 6m and 10m used for transit observations of nearby radio sources. Other antennas include a locally made Yagi-Uda antenna and pyramidal horn antennas operating at 1420 MHz and both dedicated for 21cm astronomy, a dual-dipole antenna used in the simple low cost CBSS’s Radio Jove Telescope that brings the sounds of Jupiter, Sun and the Milky-way to students, researchers and the general public. These antennae are discussed in more details in the section ‘Projects’.

 

Extragalactic Astrophysics

Modelling of spectral energy distribution of observed star forming galaxies with the aim of deriving their physical properties such as star formation rate, stellar and dust mass. We mainly use the state-of-the-art SED fitting fortran and python codes respectively, GRASIL (GRAsil and SILicates) and CIGALE (Code Investigating GALaxy Emission).

 

 

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