Near-infrared Astronomical Instrumentation at TIFR

Most of the young eruptive variables I talked about in the first talk, are heavily embedded in their envelopes. Hence, we needed near-infrared observations to capture the photons escaping from the heavily extinct regions like the inner part of the accretion disc and the magneto-sphere. While we had optical spectrographs, there was no publicly available near-infrared spectrograph in the country. In this second talk, I shall present near-infrared instrument development work, mainly of TIFR Near-infrared Spectrograph and Imager (TIRSPEC) - built for IIA's 2-m Hanle, Ladakh telescope, TIRCAM2 - the only imaging camera in the country which can observe up to 3.6 microns, and TANSPEC - the unique optical to near-infrared spectrograph which is being built for India's largest 3.6 m telescope. I shall discuss the unique design of TIRSPEC and TANSPEC, the challenges we faced in TIRSPEC and its calibrations before releasing TIRSPEC to the general astronomy community. The TANSPEC, which is being built, will be a very unique instrument in terms of its capability to cover the wavelength from optical to near-infrared in a single exposure. I shall present the progress in expertise we built up from one instrument to the next, as we went from development of imagers to spectrographs. I shall conclude the talk by briefly outlining some of the future instrumentation projects which will take us to the next level of infrared instrumentation at TIFR.