Krittika

Every one of us is amazed by the spectacle of the night sky and feels curious about its mysteries that lay hidden in plain sight. But very few follow it up as they grow up. Krittika is IIT Bombay’s focal point for amateur astronomers and casual stargazers alike.

I joined the club as a Convener in 2019, where we, a team of 8, were responsible for organizing several institute-wide events such as lectures, workshops, group discussions, documentary screenings and organizing trips to various observatories. We sensitized people to astrophotography by conducting night sky observation sessions and familiarized beginners in astronomy with basic concepts of telescope handling and observation planning. We organized competitions such as Astromania (the annual institute astronomy quiz), Scientific Computation General Championship and Observation Planning General Championship for astronomy amateurs on the campus.

Krittika Reading Club: A small group of astronomy enthusiasts who have an informative discussion on papers relevant to a pre-decided topic

A little more than a year back, March 2020 is when I was set with my manifesto to get promoted to the post of Krittika Manager, prepared after hours of groundworks, soapboxes, and interviews. I was promoted to the post of Manager of the club, with one of my best friends as the Institute Astronomy Secretary. The entire world went upside down at the start of the pandemic and like almost everything else, our plans were ruined. There was a lot we missed because of the online tenure but on the flip side, the entire year we were on our toes, active, excited, and clueless about what’s going to happen in the very next month. Considering we couldn’t control the situation, I couldn’t help but appreciate this first-of-its-kind and unique opportunity that our team got. Every team has a blueprint of the tenure passed down over the years but our team got a chance to go back at the drawing board and start things from scratch. Not able to work on the usual stuff, we had the freedom and time to try out new things every month. We realized that we don’t necessarily have to beat the benchmarks set by our predictors, but we can actually create new benchmarks! Together, we led a team of 7 Conveners and 3 Volunteers to foster enthusiasm in astronomy, tending to a community of about 100 in the institute and an online community of more than 5,500 Enthusiasts.

Traditionally, we also organised Astromania and the Observational Astronomy Lecture Series which comprised interactive sessions on Imaging Basics, Virtual Star Gazing Sessions, Multiwavelength Astronomy and Astronomical Telescopes. We also carried out an extensive publicity campaign across several social media platforms available through various interactive posts and games - trivias, messiers, videos on Stellar Evolution, weekly competitive quiz named ‘AstroMINIa’, and fun games such as Wacky Acronyms, Guess the Planet, Scribble Messier Sketches, Paradox Quiz and many more!

Astrophysics Workshops & Summer Projects

Astrophysics Workshops: We conducted a three-day Astrophysics Workshops in association with Techfest, on gravitational waves (GW) and electromagnetic (EM) transients. The workshop explored the vast multitudes that not only dealt with the two topics separately but also discussed their amalgamation and the workshop saw an audience of over a hundred enthusiastic participants who thoroughly enjoyed mind-boggling learning and experimenting with data.

Krittika Summer Projects: We supervised the Krittika Summer Projects 2020, which comprised of 2 week-long daily tutorial sessions on Numerical and Scientific Computing, catering to an online community of about 2,400 along with 6 Projects guided by experienced mentors, with an excellent response from multiple IITs and other colleges in India.

Krittika Team ANYmations

We ideated the Krittika Team ANYmations, which is led by Dr. Akshat Singhal, with a two-fold motivation, to generate scriptable animations available for anyone interested in astronomical simulations, as well as creating animations for tutorials and publicity for Indian space events and more, which are currently outsourced from outside India. We extended the Animations project of the Krittika Summer Projects to build a team of IITB students with the purpose of enabling transferable knowledge for tenures to come. We created a small group of 15 people without public recruitment to get started with tutorials in Blender, and prerequisites in python scripting. Weekly assignments were given and evaluated by the mentor. Team started with basic blender tutorials and is gradually progressing towards good astronomical animations. The team has three subsystems, namely; ASTROPHYSICS, SCRIPTING and ANIMATIONS.

Astromania & Observational Astronomy Lecture Series

Astromania: Despite the challenges of conducting and managing a quiz online, we successfully organized the flagship event of Krittika, which saw a turnout of 70+ participants in the preliminary round. The top 18 participants progressed to the final rounds, where they were divided into six teams of three each. The finals consisted of exciting rounds: Bounce and Pounce, Meme Round, Scientific Inaccuracies, Audio Round, Taboo and Among Us. Between each round, there were open questions to the audience based on the rounds, with prizes. The quiz concluded with the prize distribution ceremony, with ₹14000 worth of cash prizes being given to the top three teams. All in all, it was the culmination of weeks of planning, micromanaging and crafting questions, and a huge success.

Observational Astronomy Lecture Series: We invited Prof. Sarita Vig (IIST) to give a talk on imaging techniques, where we got an introduction to the parameters which describe a telescope, imaging devices like CCDs and the use of filters. We had a Virtual Star Gazing Session, where we demonstrated the use of Stellarium for planning observations. We explained terminologies like constellation, asterism and messiers, and had fun discussing Greek and Indian mythology. We invited Prof. Samir Dhurde (IUCAA) to give a talk on Multi-messenger astronomy, where we discussed the role of radio and short-wavelength astronomy and the progress in these fields in India. We invited Gaurav Waratkar (PhD Student at IITB) to talk about telescopes and the construction of optical and shorter/longer wavelength telescopes.

Astrophotography

We encouraged our astrophotography enthusiastic conveners by arranging data from GROWTH India Telescope where they developed an image processing technique using Siril, DS9 and Adobe Photoshop. The files were stacked according to their wavelength ranges and converted to an image format using DS9. The images were then adjusted to reveal details, assigned colours according to their wavelength ranges and flattened to produce a single, final image. Through this method, colourised images of the M3 Globular Cluster, Ring Nebula, Whirlpool Galaxy, Needle Galaxy and the Sombrero Galaxy were produced. We organised amateur ‘astrophotography competitions’ on Instagram where participants were asked to send in their photos of the comet Neowise, Saturn-Jupiter conjunction, strawberry moon and solar eclipse.

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