The above photograph is a 45 sec (negative) exposure of the M13 globular cluster taken by an amateur-class TIFR telescope. If this photo piques your interest, read on…
TIFR has a 14-inch optical telescope with a CCD camera in the Mumbai campus. Since it is located on the sea shore and near the famous South Mumbai skyline, viewing conditions can be quite poor. But amateur astronomy is not about getting Hubble quality images! Positioning your telescope at different parts of the sky; observing the moon, Jupiter and bright stars itself can be a very interesting experience!
The TIFR rooftop setup is quite advanced because it can teach you all the fundamentals of modern astronomical observation. The telescope can be automatically positioned to any part of the sky (it has a motor that will take you to the correct right ascension/declination). The telescope will also track a star as it sets over the night sky (necessary if you want to take a long exposure photograph with a CCD camera of a faint object). You can also analyze the spectrum of the light sources by attaching a spectrometer (we have an AvaSpec which is itself a very interesting instrument. See for instance here)
My exposure (pun intended) to the TIFR telescope (A Celestron CGE series 14 inch Schmidt-Cassegrain mated with SBIG ST-402 CCD Camera and an AvaSpec spectrometer) was by way of a short group project we did to calculate the apparent magnitude of the faintest stars visible in the M13 globular cluster. Using IRAF/DS9 software I got introduced to the extremely interesting world of astronomical photo-reduction. The joy of examining a star cluster on the DS9 software and then doing some photometry on them using IRAF is quite indescribable!
You can install IRAF/DS9 on Windows! (You don’t need Linux. You can install in Cygwin). Download the Cygwin version of DS9 and IRAF. (Tip: Please install DS9 explicitly from the link provided. The DS9 bundled with IRAF seems to hang). You need to have x-windows working on your Cygwin. Even if you don’t have a telescope of your own, you can analyze lots of images available for free download over the internet (from the Hubble Telescope for instance).
Using a decent amateur telescope with a CCD or working with IRAF (fits) images available on the Internet, anyone can pursue a serious hobby in astronomy. Come, revel in the wonders of distant stars and galaxies.
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