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02-12-2008
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A Successful Pulsar Busy Week for LOFAR

Submitter: Jason Hessels on behalf of the LOFAR Pulsar Working Group
Description: November 17th - 21st, 2008 was designated a LOFAR pulsar "busy week", to concentrate on the commissioning of beam-formed, i.e. non-imaging, modes. This week brought together the LOFAR Pulsar Working Group, the observers, and several developers and support scientists. Overall, this week has been a major success. Several known pulsars were detected for the first time with LOFAR (see image for examples). These are all detectable using only a single high-band LOFAR tile, and have been identified as good test sources for future commissioning activities. Also, several important bugs were identified and fixed during the pulsar busy week. In particular, station tracking using a coherent sum of all the elements within a station is now debugged and working properly. This greatly enhances our ability to continue further beam-formed commissioning and solves issues which have important consequences for all LOFAR modes. More results from this week will be highlighted soon in upcoming ASTRON/JIVE Daily Images.

Thanks to everyone who was involved for making the week so valuable and successful. We eagerly await the next pulsar "busy week".
Copyright: LOFAR Pulsar Working Group
 
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