Goal
NIATW was addressed to advanced students and researchers, mainly from South-East Asian countries where such training opportunities and adequate facilities are not always readily available. The focus of this first NIATW was about time-variable phenomena in Astrophysics, with emphasis on short time scales from days to sub-seconds. Examples are: stellar pulsation, oscillations, occultations, transits, exoplanets, binaries, accretion-driven variability. Also the use of archival data was promoted, e.g. to study variability in AGNs.
Program
The program included two days of lectures in the class-room in Chiang Mai, and 5 days at the observatory site including a total of 3 nights of telescope time (4 shared nights and 1 full night). The official program is attached. It was executed almost exactly, with small variations e.g. when we had a blackout in the lecture room, and some minor exchanges among different observing slots.
The official program included:
– 21 hours of lectures (partly with tutorials for Sessions E,F).
– 15.5 hours of data reduction tutorials
– 35.5 hours of observations (including twilights). About 11 hours of observations were lost due to weather and partly replaced with additional tutorials. Data could be obtained for all Sessions, although Session D was highly penalized with only < 2 hours of observations available.
One brief excursion to the Twin Pagodas on Doi Inthanon was organized in the morning of March 29, and an additional optional brief excursion to the Royal Project was offered on the morning of March 31.
Outcome
The students learned to use archival data and online databases during Sessions E,F. In the other sessions, the instrumentation made available to the participants consisted of the Medium Resolution Echelle Spectrograph (MRES) and of the ULTRASPEC imaging camera. Data reduction was carried out with IRAF, with the ULTRASPEC/ULTRACAM pipeline, with the DECH spectroscopic data reduction package, and with the suite of LO software by A. Richichi (ALOR). Sessions A,B,C obtained original results which are of science grade and likely to be included in future refereeed publications. The participants also learned to prepare observations and to make occultation predictions.
Read the final report of the Workshop in pdf