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17-11-2017
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Highschool students observe the Crab pulsar in Dwingeloo

Submitter: Tammo Jan Dijkema, CAMRAS
Description: On 20 October, a group of high school students from around the country visited ASTRON and CAMRAS to do their own observations with the Dwingeloo telescope. Independently, these students had discovered the Dwingeloo Live program. In that program, students do their own observation with the Dwingeloo telescope, and afterwards perform the data reduction through a web front-end. With their analysis, they find the period and dispersion measure of a pulsar, after which they fold the data to get a nice profile.

Until now, Dwingeloo Live was mainly used with pulsar B0329+54, which is very bright. However, some of the students had a particular interest in the Crab nebula. Therefore, we decided to do a crab pulsar observation as well. For astronomical reasons, this observation was scheduled at 8:30 AM.

With the help of Cees Bassa, we managed to catch some nice data of the Crab pulsar. The pulse profile is shown at the bottom of this image. (In principle, the telescope back-end by Paul Boven can work with higher time resolution, but even the 32 bins for the 3.3 ms period show the pulse and interpulse.) We even caught some giant pulses. The data and some more plots are available here.

Apart from the pulsar observations, the students were also treated to lectures from Paul Boven and Vanessa Moss. We look forward to seeing some of these students back as colleagues when they have further progressed in their careers.
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