36th Annual Report (2023-24)

105 Radio Astronomy Winter School 2023 IUCAA and NCRA–TIFR jointly organised the 16th Radio Astronomy Winter School 2023 (RAWS2023) from 12th to 22nd December 2023. RAWS in its present format invites both student participants and college and university faculty members to mentor the student groups formed for the school's activities. This year, 24 student participants and 7 faculty mentors participated in the programme. The lecture sessions started with an introduction to the radio Universe and future prospects, followed by single d i sh r ad i o t e l e s cope s and r ad i o interferometry. The later lecture sessions covered radiative processes, error analysis, positional astronomy, solar radio astronomy, Aditya L1 and beyond, pulsars, millisecond pulsars and gravitational waves, radio transients, our Galaxy and its constituents, gas in galaxies, radio emission from galaxies and cosmology and its present status, and the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope (GMRT) and highlights of recent results. The main emphasis of RAWS is on hands-on radio astronomy related experiments. The participants worked in groups with their faculty mentors on experiments characterizing detector noise, gain, and directionality, and worked on a super-heterodyne receiver system. They determined the transmission cable characteristics and also used a horn antenna to observe the 21-cm Hydrogen emission to obtain Galaxy rotation curves. A highlight of the school was a day trip to the GMRT, where the participants got a guided tour of the observatory's design and functioning by Kaushal Buch, Shubendu Joarder, Subhashis Roy and Dhruba J Saikia. On the final day, the student groups Dipankar Bhattacharya describing the experiments developed at Ashoka University creative set of experiments at the undergraduate level developed by Dipankar Bhattacharya and his team at Ashoka University. The workshop covered a wide range of experiments including optical data analysis using archival data as well, such as from GAIA, a number of radio-astronomy related experiments including determining the rotation curve of the Galaxy from observations of neutral atomic hydrogen and analysis of pulsar data, planetary data analysis, cometary data and astrometry, stellarium-related experiments, gravitational lensing, gamma ray astronomy, gravitational waves, and on the Sun and stars. Many of the experiments have also been written up and will soon be put in the repository. The workshop was organized by TeamACE IUCAA. Group photograph and glimpses from RAWS2023 presented one of their chosen experiments and competed in a game-style quiz on the topics taught in the school. In addition to the organizers listed below, the resource persons included