36th Annual Report (2023-24)

106 Introductory Course on Astronomy and Astrophysics for College Teachers An introductory course on astronomy and astrophysics for college teachers in collaboration with the IUCAA Centre for Astronomy Research and Development at the Central University of Himachal Pradesh started on the 22nd of March and ended on the 27th of May. The resource persons were Sarita Vig (IIST Trivandrum) who spoke on stars and stellar evolution, Dhruba J Saikia (IUCAA) who spoke on multi-messenger astronomy and the Milky Way, Prakash Arumugasamy (IUCAA) who conducted a number of discussion and tutorial sessions, Hum Chand (Central University of Himachal Pradesh) who spoke on positional and observational astronomy, Jasjeet S Bagla (IISERMohali) who spoke on cosmology and structure formation, andDipankar Banerjee (ARIES) who spoke on the Sun. There were about thirty participants in the Introductory Course. The course was coordinated by Hum Chand along with Team ACE IUCAA. An online quiz was held after the Course and Certificates of participation were given to those who performed satisfactorily. The Coursewas coordinated by HumChand and TeamACE IUCAA. Introductory Nissim Kanekar, Divya Oberoi, Bhal Chandra Joshi, Ruta Kale, Yogesh Maan and Tirthankar Roychoudhury (all from NCRA-TIFR) and Neeraj Gupta, Dipanjan Mukherjee, Ranjeev Misra and Durgesh Tripathi (all from IUCAA). The students' and faculty's enthusiasm and active participation helpedmake this an enjoyable educational event. The organizing teamcomprised of Rajeshwari Dutta, Ashish Mhaske, Avinash Deshpande, Jameer Manur, Prakash Arumugasamy andDhruba J. Saikia from IUCAA andSubhashis Roy fromNCRA-TIFR. Refresher Course on Astronomy and Astrophysics The Refresher Course on Astronomy and Astrophysics 2023 was held online from the15th of May to the 16th of June. It was held concurrently with the Summer School on Astronomy and Astrophysics which was held offline. There were about thirty participants from higher educational institutions fromacross the country. The lectures covered a wide range of topics introducing the basic important topics of the field which included radiative processes, stellar structure and evolution, the Sun, compact objects, galaxies, galactic dynamics, active galactic nuclei and jets, gravitational lensing, x- ray astronomy, fluids and plasmas, general theory of relativity and cosmology, structure formation, photometry and spectroscopy as well as recent advances. The latter included the exciting field of gravitational wave astronomy and LIGO, machine learning, quantum clocks, and the mega projects such as the Thirty Meter Telescope, LIGO, Aditya-L1 and the Square Kilometre Array. An online quiz was held after the Course and Certificates of participation were given to all those who performed satisfactorily. The Refresher Course was coordinated by Vaidehi Paliya and TeamACE IUCAA.