Daily Image
13-03-2009
Pulsar Busy Week 2
| Submitter: | LOFAR Pulsar and High-Performance Computing Groups |
| Description: | March 5th-11th, 2009 was LOFAR "Pulsar Busy Week 2". The point of these busy weeks is to bring together astronomers, observers, and developers to close the loop on development and make leaps in LOFAR functionality. Pulsar Busy Week 2 was again a big success. The most outstanding advance is that beam-formed/tied-array data can now be taken and processed online on BG/P. This greatly reduces the amount of data that must be recorded as well as the amount of post-processing required. Not only does this bring us one big step closer to the ultimate "Pulsar Pipeline", it greatly facilitates testing of the code through observations. Two crucial aspects of the LOFAR Pulsar Pipeline are now also functional: namely the ability to form a variable number of spectral channels within the subbands and the formation of multiple "pencil beams" within the primary beam. Both of these are required to do a sensitive pulsar/fast transient survey with LOFAR. To demonstrate the new ease of observation and to test the stability of the system, we observed the circumpolar pulsar B0809+74 for an astounding 64 straight hours from March 6th-9th (above). The observed brightness of the pulsar varies with time as it changes angle with respect to the zenith, but the dominant effect appears to be scintillation ("twinkling") due to the interstellar medium. |
| Copyright: | ASTRON/JvL |
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