| Authors : | Harsh Kumar [1], Dorje Angchuk [2], G.C. Anupama [3], Sudhanshu Barway [3], Varun Bhalerao [1], Kunal Deshmukh [1,4], Padma Dorjay [2], Anirban Dutta [3], Simran Joharle [5], Viraj Karambelkar [1, 6], Maitreya Khandagale [1], Atharva Patil [1,7], Subham Samantaray[1], Kritti Sharma [1], Yashvi Sharma [1,6], Shubham Srivastava[1,8], Tsewang Stanzin [2], , Vishwajeet Swain [1],
Affiliations:-
[1] Indian Institue of Technology Bombay
[2] Indian Institue of Astrophysics, Hanle (Ladakh)
[3] Indian Astronomical Observatory, Bangalore
[4] Texas Tech University
[5] Fergusson College, Pune
[6] California Institute of Technology (Caltech)
[7] National Central University, Taiwan
[8] Queen's University Belfast
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| Abstract : | The GROWTH-India telescope (GIT) is a fully autonomous telescope dedicated to time-domain astronomy. The telescope is situated at the Indian astronomical observatory (IAO), Hanle, 4500 m above sea level and is operated jointly by IIT Bombay and IIA. This 0.7m telescope is accompanied by a 4K CCD camera with a 0.5 sq. deg field of view making it suitable for the study of optical counterparts to gravitational wave (GW) events, and gamma-ray burst (GRB) afterglows. GIT has contributed significantly to a variety of science cases, including the follow-up of GW events during O3, rapid follow-up of fast transients like GRB optical afterglows, SNe, observations of near-earth objects, etc. To date, GIT has published more than 7 refereed papers, and over 150 GCNs, ATels, and MPECs, thanks to its high-efficiency observing operations and standardized data products. The observing operation, as well as data reduction of GIT, are autonomous. The fully automated data reduction pipeline can perform tasks like data download, data reduction, transient search with its newly built image subtraction, and transient search with ~94% efficiency. This pipeline is further supported with a few helper slack bots that can trigger the telescope for GRB events and other Target of Opportunity observations (ToOs). The telescope does preliminary error handling on its own and notifies the observer with a phone call if a severe quality error occurs during observations. The telescope and pipeline can observe and perform data reduction automatically for sidereal and non-sidereal targets. |
