India's First Robotic Eye for Time-domain Astrophysics: The GROWTH-India Telescope

Creators: Kumar, Harsh; Bhalerao, Varun; Anupama, G. C.; Barway, Sudhanshu; Basu, Judhajeet; Deshmukh, Kunal; De, Kishalay; Dutta, Anirban; Fremling, Christoffer; Iyer, Hrishikesh; Jassani, Adeem; Joharle, Simran; Karambelkar, Viraj; Khandagale, Maitreya; Krishna, K. Adithya; Kulkarni, Sumeet; Mate, Sujay; Patil, Atharva; Phanindra, DVS; Samantaray, Subham; Sharma, Kritti; Sharma, Yashvi; Shenoy, Vedant; Singh, Avinash; Srivastava, Shubham; Swain, Vishwajeet; Waratkar, Gaurav; Angchuk, Dorje; Dorjay, Padma; Dorjai, Tsewang; Gyalson, Tsewang; Jorphail, Sonam; Mahay, Tashi Thsering; Norbu, Rigzin; Sharma, Tarun Kumar; Stanzin, Jigmet; Stanzin, Tsewang; Stanzin, Urgain

Abstract

We present the design and performance of the GROWTH-India telescope, a 0.7 m robotic telescope dedicated to time-domain astronomy. The telescope is equipped with a 4k back-illuminated camera that gives a 0.°82 field of view and a sensitivity of m_(g′) ∼ 20.5 in 5 minute exposures. Custom software handles observatory operations: attaining high on-sky observing efficiencies (≳80%) and allowing rapid response to targets of opportunity. The data processing pipelines are capable of performing point-spread function photometry as well as image subtraction for transient searches. We also present an overview of the GROWTH-India telescope's contributions to the studies of gamma-ray bursts, the electromagnetic counterparts to gravitational wave sources, supernovae, novae, and solar system objects.

Additional Information

© 2022. The Author(s). Published by the American Astronomical Society. Original content from this work may be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence. Any further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the title of the work, journal citation and DOI. Received 2022 May 13; revised 2022 June 22; accepted 2022 June 22; published 2022 August 10. arsh 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). Software: Astropy (Astropy Collaboration et al. 2013, 2018), Numpy (van der Walt et al. 2011), Matplotlib (Hunter 2007), Astro-SCRAPPY (McCully & Tewes 2019), Flask (Grinberg 2018), SExtractor (Bertin & Arnouts 1996), PSFEx (Bertin 2011), SWarp (Bertin et al. 2002), pyzogy (Guevel & Hosseinzadeh 2017), astrometry.net (Lang et al. 2010).

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