| Abstract : | In this talk, I'll summarize the PRL Mt Abu 2.5m Telescope performance results and an overview of First light backend instruments PARAS-2 and Faint Object Camera.
The PRL Mt Abu 2.5m Telescope, situated at 1680m at Mt Abu, Rajasthan, is the second-largest astronomical telescope in India. The 2.5m Telescope was designed and developed by AMOS Belgium in accordance with PRL's scientific requirements. The 2.5-meter telescope was set up on Mount Abu, and its Site Acceptance Test (SAT) was completed in the middle of October 2022.
PARAS-2:(PRL ADVANCED ABU SKY SEARCH) is a High-Resolution Fibre Fed Spectrograph, a second-generation instrument developed in-house as one of the backend instruments of 2.5m Telescope. Resolution of approx. 110000 in the 380 to 700 nm wavelength range. To achieve radial velocity measurement precision of less than 1m/sec, the spectrograph is kept inside a stable environment (Pressure &Temperature).
Faint Object Camera (FOC): CCD Imager consists of a set of SDSS (Sloan Digital Sky Survey) u, g, r, I, and z photometric band filters with a 4k X 4k ANDOR CCD. With the aforementioned filters, CCD Imager will primarily be used for photometry studies of various astronomical objects.
The CCD imager's FOV is 10' x 10'.The instrument is attached to the main port of the 2.5m telescope. Two filter wheels (diameter approx. 360mm) have been realized for mounting the filters. The controller for filter wheels is designed and developed entirely in-house. Custom-built software has been developed in-house for atomizing the operations of the instrument. The neutral density filter will help us image bright sources without saturating the detector. The FOC will be sensitive enough to detect faint sources with the sky background limit of 21 magnitude in the SDSS i-band and will be helpful for extragalactic astronomy and GRB observations.
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