An Introduction to Pulsar Timing
In this lecture Matthew Bailes introduces students to the pulsar archive data format and the psrchive software used to analyse and reduce pulsar data, including how to plot pulsar archive data. The lecture ends with notes on generating pulsar arrival times (ToAs) and investigating the residuals between the generated ToAs and a timing model using tempo2 software. After the formal demonstration, the lecturer also demonstrates many of these commands interactively sharing his screen.
The lecture is followed by a psrchive tutorial exercise led by Aditya Parthasarathy, the recording of which can be viewed under the Materials tab.
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Exercises
The data and exercises for all workshop lectures can be downloaded (and extracted) to the shared directory in your virtual machine as described here.
Following along with Matthew Bailes's presentation
Within the downloaded directory, /home/pulsar/SHARE/exercises/lec5_pulsar_timing_intro, on your virtual machine you will find workshop.tar.gz which can be extracted using,
tar -xvf workshop.tar.gz
to produce a directory MeerKAT_tutorial. From here you can follow along the commands that Matthew Bailes uses in his presentation.
Psrchive tutorial exercise
The psrchive tutorial exercise develops student’s familiarity with using a variety of tools within the psrchive software suite. The tutorial instructions are contained in PSRCHIVE_AP.pdf and can be found in the downloaded directory, /home/pulsar/SHARE/exercises/lec6_pulsar_timing_models, on your virtual machine. The tutorial relies on data within the PSRCHIVE directory in lec6_pulsar_timing_models.
Note: this lecture 5 exercise is contained within the lecture 6 directory.
Psrchive tutorial recording
A walk through by Aditya Parthasarathy of the first part of this psrchive tutorial, on working with pulsar data, is recorded in three parts.
Note: these are live session recordings containing silence sections to allow students to work independently.
