India's First Robotic Eye for Time-domain Astrophysics: The GROWTH-India Telescope
Harsh Kumar, V. Bhalerao, G. C. Anupama, Sudhanshu Barway, Judhajeet Basu, K. Deshmukh, Kishalay De, Anirban Dutta, C. Fremling, Hrishikesh Iyer, Adeem Jassani, Simran Joharle, Viraj Karambelkar, Maitreya Khandagale, Krishna, K. Adithya, Sumeet Kulkarni, Sujay Mate, Atharva Patil, D. V. S. Phanindra, Subham Samantaray, Kritti Sharma, Y. Sharma, V. Shenoy, Avinash Singh, Shubham Srivastav, Vishwajeet Swain, G. Waratkar, Dorje Angchuk, Padma Dorjay, Tsewang Dorjai, Tsewang Gyalson, Sonam Jorphail, Tashi Thsering Mahay, Rigzin Norbu, Tarun Kumar Sharma, Jigmet Stanzin, Tsewang Stanzin, U. Stanzin
Abstract
sponsorship: The GROWTH-India Telescope (GIT) is a 70 cm telescope with a 0.7 degree field of view, set up by the Indian Institute of Astrophysics and the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay with support from the Indo-US Science and Technology Forum (IUSSTF) and the Science and Engineering Research Board (SERB) of the Department of Science and Technology (DST), Government of India. It is located at the Indian Astronomical Observatory (Hanle), operated by the Indian Institute of Astrophysics (IIA). We acknowledge funding by the IITB alumni batch of 1994, which partially supports operations of the telescope. Telescope technical details are available at.29 Harsh Kumar thanks the LSSTC Data Science Fellowship Program, which is funded by LSSTC, NSF Cybertraining Grant #1829740, the Brinson Foundation, and the Moore Foundation; his participation in the program has benefited this work. This research has made use of the NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database (NED), which is funded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and operated by the California Institute of Technology. This research has made use of NASA's Astrophysics Data System. This research has made use of data and/or services provided by the International Astronomical Union's Minor Planet Center. This research has made use of the VizieR catalog access tool, CDS, Strasbourg, France (DOI:10.26093/cds/vizier). The original description of the VizieR service was published in 2000, A&AS 143, 23. This research made use of Astropy,30 a community-developed core Python package for Astronomy (Astropy Collaboration et al. 2013, 2018). (Indo-US Science and Technology Forum (IUSSTF), Science and Engineering Research Board (SERB) of the Department of Science and Technology (DST), Government of India, IITB, LSSTC Data Science Fellowship Program - LSSTC, NSF Cybertraining Grant|1829740, Brinson Foundation, Moore Foundation, National Aeronautics and Space Administration)