Project Trains Students Worldwide Using Astronomy Archival Data

Astrosprint is a follow up on the OAD funded project “Astronomy from Archival Data”, designed to engage and train undergraduate and postgraduate students during the pandemic when people were confined at home. The project had almost 1000 registrations from students belonging to almost 25 countries. Online sessions of 1.5 hours were conducted on weekends (Saturday and Sunday) with recorded sessions available on Youtube for students depending on their time-zones and work constraints.

The project AstroSprint is an extension of the first project and consisted of three meetings: Enterprise, Discovery and the Next Gen. The first was a three-day school held from 26- 28 March 2021. The second workshop, Discovery was held from 21-31 August. The third workshop was held in offline (and hybrid) mode on 3-5 June 2022.

Online workshops on Big Data and 2 Workshops on Citizen Science Projects were also organized. The project is a Global Sky Partner for the LCO robotic telescope and hence conducted workshops on data analysis with LCO (Observations with Robotic Telescopes) to give students a feel of real observations. Another three Training Workshops were conducted specially for the International Astronomical Union: Women in Astronomy Working Group in November 2021, January 2022 and April 2022.  

Many participants have presented their projects, recordings of which are available. As this in an ongoing project, participants are free to do projects available on our channel and website.

One publication has come out so far: M.Mahmudunnobe, P.Hasan, M.Raja, S.N.Hasan, “Membership of Stars in Open Clusters using Random Forest with Gaia Data”, European Physical Journal Special Topics. doi:10.1140/epjs/s11734-021-00205-x arXiv:2103.05826 [astro-ph.SR]