Keralam

(I will describe my visit to Indian Institute of Space and Technology, Trivandrum for National Initiative on Undergraduate Science Program in Astronomy. This probably is my last project related to astronomy as an undergraduate.)

December 2017

God’s own country. The land of coconuts (Kera + alam). There are not enough adjectives to do justice to this part of the country. It’s greatness lies in its most natural habitat, the likes of which is not present anywhere in India. For me, Kerala’s tropical vegetation was most refreshing after living in relatively temperate lands most of the time.

The NIUS Astronomy Camp started on a Sunday. Yes, we started working on a holiday! After a brief round of introductions to the research project, we dived right in. They introduced us to Aladin, a software to view regions of the sky in different wavelengths and ds9, a tool to view FITS files. The project was to work on a region IRAS 16164-5046 and to determine as much as we can from its characteristics in different wavelengths.

I decided to work on a project related to molecular clouds since it had a component wherein I had to write my own code. Since I am skeptical of working with code blackboxes, I thought this project would be most suited for me. My work in this project was focused on fitting a blackbody spectrum to the images of the regions in four far-infrared bands. The end result of this calculation was the column density and temperature of the region. We used this data to identify clumps in the regions and tabulated data for each of those identified clumps.

Onto less serious stuff, the camp also had a visit to Thumba, India’s first rocket launching station. We visited the space museum which had exhibits from the early sounding rockets to the current PSLV and GSLV. Finally, we ended our trip with a visit to the Kovalam beach. With loads of coffee, a book in hand and the gushing waves, it was an evening well spent.

Summing up, this trip to Kerala also included the submission of my first paper and my applications for graduate schools. With loads of mixed feelings about the future, this vacation brought a fitting end to an extremely busy semester and a happening 2017.