High-energy Astronomy with Meteorological Balloons: Detection of Crab Radiation Using Phoswich Detector

Using the space exploration facility with meteorological balloons of Indian Centre for Space Physics, we detect the X-ray radiation from Crab pulsar. We use a phoswich detector for this purpose. We present the design considerations and characterization of the detector along with a brief description of the overall techniques adopted in this experiment. Background radiation produced in the atmosphere is one of the major concern for this kind of experiments. We empirically model the background radiation in the detector environment at various altitudes to extract the source radiation spectrum. This also allow us to calculate minimum detection limit on the detector in such experimental conditions, for extrasolar radiation sources.