THE IUCAA TELESCOPE


On the advice of the UGC and the SAC, IUCAA has set up a telescope of its own for its observational programmes.

Presently the telescope is being widely used by astronomers from the university sector as well as from other institutions.

Some details about the telescope are discussed under the following sections:

The Telescope:

The telescope has a 2 metre aperture f/3 primary of Astro-Sital, and a Ritchey-Chretien optics to get a focal ratio of 10 at the Cassegrain focal station. A corrector is available to get < 0.6" images upto a field radius of 21' in the optical band.

Alt-az mount, with gear drives and tape encoders is used to get a pointing accuracy of 2", and an autoguider is available for sub-arcsec tracking.

The Site:

The site selected is near the village Giravali, in tahasil Junnar of Pune district ( Latitude ~ 19 deg 4.4 arcmin North, and Longitude ~ 73 deg 50.8 arcmin East ). It is located at a height of about 1000 metres, and is at a distance of about 80 km by road from IUCAA. The site parameters were measured during Nov. 96 to Feb. 97, are given below:

Instruments:

The imager-spectrograph for the optical band ( 3500 A- 8500 A ) is similar to DFOSC ( Danish Faint Object Spectrographic Camera ) and is called IFOSC; it has field of about 11' X 11', a set of filters for imaging, and a set of grisms for spectroscopy with resolutions in range 300-3000. It has been made in collaboration with the Copenhagen University Observatory, Copenhagen, with financial assistant from the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, and the Department of Science and Technology.

Click IFOSC IFOSC to see a enlarged picture of the spectrograph.

Calibration Unit:

To calibrate IFOSC a seperate unit called the CALIBRATION UNIT has been attached to it. This unit has been completely built by us.

The calibration unit houses the following spectral lamps, He, Ne, Zn, Cu. For flat fielding a white LED and a halogen lamp has also been mounted on the integration sphere.

The calibration unit also houses two filter wheels on which neutral density filters can be mounted.

Click CALIBRATION UNIT CALIBRATION UNIT to see a enlarged picture of the calibration unit.

CCD :

The golden coloured cylindrical box seen in IFOSC image above is the dewar; it houses the imaging chip called CCD chip.

Click CCD CCD to see a picture of EEV, 2K X 2K , CCD chip housed inside the dewar.

Polarimeter :

A polarimetric module used with IFOSC to measure the degree of linear polarization of stellar light is also available among the other back-end instruments developed for the IUCAA telescope. It is essentially a combination of a Half Wave Plate (modulator) and an Wollaston Prism (analyzer).

Click Polarimeter CCD to see a picture of the polarimetric module.

Buildings:

In order to minimise the adverse effects of the buildings on seeing, in addition to the telescope building a service building is located about 80 metres away. The telescope building houses only the telescope and the control room; all other facilities are located in the service building.


This page is maintained by Dr. H.K.Das.
H.K.Das < hkdas@iucaa.ernet.in >
Last updated 25/03/2012