Dr. Siddharth Maharana

In the first part of the talk, I will present FiberPol, a newly commissioned spectropolarimeter on the South African Astronomical Observatory’s (SAAO) 1.9m telescope, for which I serve as the Principal Investigator. On track to become a facility instrument, FiberPol complements the existing suite of observational capabilities on the SAAO telescopes, with a particular focus on interstellar dust and transient science. It combines two niche techniques—fiber-based spectroscopy and polarimetry. In addition to enabling a wide array of new science, it also serves as a technology pathfinder for the 10m SALT and future thirty-meter class observatories. I will present the instrument design, results from its commissioning in early 2025, and the future roadmap. In the second part, I will present the WALOP instruments, currently under development at IUCAA for the PASIPHAE survey. WALOPs will be the first wide-field (35' × 35'), survey-capable optical polarimeters in astronomy and will be used to produce the first large-scale optical polarimetric map of the sky, covering over 2000 square degrees. PASIPHAE aims to create a 3D tomographic map of magnetic fields and dust clouds in the interstellar medium. Finally, I will briefly discuss ongoing work at the University of Oxford on the Planetary Camera and Spectrograph (PCS) for the 39m European Extremely Large Telescope, focusing on R&D aimed at achieving the high contrast needed to detect and characterize potentially habitable Earth-like exoplanets.