The annual retreat at the Observatoire de Haute-Provence for M2 students in Astrophysics (Claude Bernard Lyon 1 University and University of Montpellier) and CCP (Cosmos, Fields, and Particles, Montpellier) took place this year from September 23 to 27.
This year, a record number of 29 students were able to use three OHP telescopes as well as the LabEx OCEVU IRiS telescope to carry out 10 projects (determining the age of a star cluster, characterizing a region of ionized hydrogen, studying a spiral galaxy, etc.). During their stay, the students also had theopportunity to visit the 193-cm telescope and the ELODIE spectrograph, with which Swiss astronomers Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz discovered the first exoplanet orbiting a main-sequence star in 1995.
This visit is an important moment for our Master’s students, who have the opportunity to meet the entire class spread across two sites and to collect professional-quality data themselves, which will enable them to conduct a group research project throughout the semester.
Periods of favorable weather were used to collect several thousand images and hundreds of spectra to complete their projects and then produce some astrophotography images.
This trip is organized with the support of the Physics Departments of the Faculties of Science at the University of Montpellier and Claude Bernard University Lyon 1, as well as Labex LIO and LUPM.
More photos from the 2024 OHP trip are available on Flickr.
Julien Morin, Bertrand Plez, Johan Richard, Yannick Copin, and Jean-François Gonzalez.