Daily Image
06-03-2018
Putting the Dwingeloo telescope to use: a Bright Pulsar Survey
| Submitter: | Tammo Jan Dijkema & Cees Bassa |
| Description: | Anyone who has visited the Dwingeloo Telescope in the last five years knows that the venerable (semi-retired) 25m radio telescope can observe pulsars. The regular tour includes a live stream of the brightest pulsar around: B0329+54. Other pulsars can, and have been observed by observing a bit longer and folding the data. However, until now, no structural effort has been undertaken to do a survey. For this Dwingeloo Survey of Bright Pulsars (backronym suggestions welcome) we intend to observe as many pulsars as we can on 70 and 21 cm. A start has been made in January 2018. The results of the survey are available as Open Data, so that everyone can play with it. We have also tried to make the data easily accessible, by providing it in standard formats, such as plain numpy arrays. The data is available at https://charon.camras.nl/public/pulsars For our observations, we use the backend that Paul Boven made, with a bandwidth of 35MHz and 468us time resolution (we may switch to a new backend or a better observing mode halfway). The data is dumped into filterbank format and processed with dspsr and sigproc. In parallel, a colleague at CAMRAS is performing the same kind of observations with a 20 euro RTL-SDR dongle and Windows software, also obtaining encouraging results. We intend to also include his results in the survey. The screenshot on the lower right shows a GUI for slewing the telescope to a desired pulsar, taken from PSRCAT. The program shows a list of observable pulsars with their relevant properties, such as the time of transit and the maximum elevation. Also, it acts as a database of pulsars that already have been observed. The GUI is a simple (open source) result of mixing astropy, astroplan, psrqpy, Matplotlib, PyQT5 and the python interface to the console of the Dwingeloo telescope. For safety reasons the 'slew to' button only works when the programme runs inside the telescope. Performing a survey takes many hours of observing time. Volunteers for joining the effort are welcome. |
| Copyright: | CC-BY-4.0 Tammo Jan Dijkema |
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