Khagol Bulletin # 135 (Jan 2025) - ENG

| 06 | KHAG L | No. 135 - JANUARY 2025 17th Radio Astronomy Winter School The 17th edition of the annual Radio Astronomy Winter School (RAWS) was organised jointly by IUCAA and NCRA–TIFR from December 14-24, 2024. Twenty- seven student participants were selected among more than 560 applications received. The educators, ten in all, comprised faculty members, research scholars, post-doctoral fellows, and scientific staff interested in adopting radio astronomy concepts and experiments in their college-level course curricula. The students were second and third-year undergraduates who had been introduced to radio astronomy for the first time. The lecture sessions started with a broad overview of radio astronomy and various radio observation techniques. The later lecture sessions covered stellar structure, radiative processes, cosmology, the Sun, galaxy clusters, pulsars, active galaxies, fast radio bursts, and multiwavelength astronomy, to emphasise the role of radio observations in revealing the nature of the systems. During the late morning and afternoon sessions, the participants worked in groups on experiments characterising detector noise, gain, and directionality. They also used a horn antenna to observe the 21-cm Hydrogen emission to obtain galaxy rotation curves. One of the highlights of the school was a day trip to the Giant Meterwave Radio Telescope, where the participants got a guided tour of the observatory's design and functioning by Subhashis Roy, Ashish Mhaske and Mekhala Muley, an engineer at GMRT. On the final day, the student groups presented one of their chosen experiments and competed in a game-style quiz on the topics taught in the school. The students' and faculty's enthusiasm and active participation helped make this an enjoyable educational event. The organising committee comprised Ashish Mhaske, Avinash Deshpande, Dhruba J S a i k i a , J ame e r Ma n u r , P r a k a s h Arumugasamy, and Rajeshwari Dutta, all from IUCAA and Subhashis Roy fromNCRA- TIFR.