Daily Image
21-10-2022
Dwingeloo Bright Pulsar Survey, take 2
| Submitter: | Tammo Jan Dijkema |
| Description: | The second Dwingeloo Bright Pulsar Survey was completed last weekend (over four years after part 1). This survey was carried out by two high-school students from RSG Wolfsbos in Hoogeveen, as part of their 'profielwerkstuk'. For the survey, a special pulsar-centered user interface was developed for the telescope. This interface consists of a sky map and two buttons: 'Slew' and 'Record'. This allowed the students to plan and perform the survey almost entirely by themselves. We observed 18 known pulsars on one day, with 12 successful detections. Performing the survey took about five hours, including a pizza break. We observed 20MHz of bandwidth around 437MHz, so including the entire 70cm amateur radio band. This partly explains the large amounts of RFI in the observations. Some manual extra RFI removal still helped in some observations. The photo shows the students examining an observation in psrchive. A new pulsar backend was developed for this project. It is based around a commercial-off-the-shelf SDR receiver (Ettus B210), which streams data to dspsr for dedispersion. By using streaming coherent dedispersion, it is not necessary to save the 40MB/s data stream to disk. Thanks to Thomas, Cees and Kaustubh for their help setting this up. The results of the pulsar survey are available as open data here. Next to the psrchive files, lots of metadata is available in the SigMF format. Since the telescope's clock is synced to the Westerbork maser, we're quite confident that this data will be useful in the future: with a good time reference we can combine multiple observations. While the pipeline is being improved (dual polarization is almost there!) we still welcome volunteers for observing for the survey, as observing pulsars takes time. |
| Copyright: | CC-BY 4.0 Tammo Jan Dijkema |
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