Daily Image
26-03-2010
Pulsar Busy Week 7: Moving Towards an Automated Pulsar Pipeline
| Submitter: | Jason Hessels (LOFAR Pulsar Working Group) |
| Description: | In the most recent Pulsar Busy Week (March 8th-14th, 2010), our aim was to push forward with increasing the robustness of standard LOFAR pulsar observations and to make the first steps towards automating the entire pipeline, including the post processing. This involved debugging some observing issues and placing our reduction scripts into the generic "LOFAR pipeline framework". The primary goal is to make such observations as easy to run and reliable as possible so that we can make the most efficient use of LOFAR. By the end of the week, we were able to successfully schedule blocks of many observations through SAS/MAC and have them run reliably through a whole weekend. Some of the resulting data is shown in this daily image. Pictured are the average profiles of nine pulsars, observed automatically via SAS/MAC over a weekend. Only half the rotational phase is shown in each case. Each pulsar was observed for roughly an hour with the HBA tiles, using different combinations of stations, with up to 12 stations at a time added incoherently. These are the highest quality data we have taken thus far. The future holds even more promise: with the full set of calibrated LOFAR stations added coherently, we should be able to achieve another factor of 10 increase in sensitivity compared with these detections! |
| Copyright: | ASTRON/LOFAR |
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