Pulsar Observatory for Students, ORT, July '13 - An overview of the project work




As i mentioned in a previous post, student projects as part of POS was to observe a pulsar & a calibrator using the ORT and infer properties of the pulsar such as period of the pulsar, flux density and dispersion measure (and therefore distance to the pulsar). We were given a list of pulsars (refer to the post aforementioned) & corresponding calibrators and asked to choose one pair.
                      
                     To be noted here that a calibrator for a pulsar cannot be more than +/- 5 degrees away from the pulsar as the atmospheric response is different at different angles. And we need the pulsar & the calibrator to have the same atmospheric response (DUH!).

 Choosing a pulsar was the first problem. I looked up properties (period, profile width and strength) of each of the pulsars from ATNF and NED and chose a pulsar which i felt was interesting (slide 3). ORT observes at 326.5 MHz and the next step was to estimate the strength of the pulsar at the ORT observing frequency (slide 8).

                      This is needed before observations start as the telescope response can be set according to the strength of the source.

Having observed the pulsar, SIGPROC was used to reduce and analyze the time series data. I am not going to delve into the process now. Before i end, there is one more interesting thing we found during data analysis.

                      Slides 24 & 25 might not make much sense but note slides 26 & 27.

The x-axis is the frequency of observation and the y-axis is flux (in random units). It is obvious from here that the telescope itself has a frequency dependent response function. Not to brag but i discovered this on my own and the faculty admitted to their being such a problem (for quite a while) and that it was being corrected.

Popular posts from this blog

Farewell to Enthought

I started my professional career at Enthought , at the Pune office in India, on Feb 29, 2016. Over the course of eight long years, I spent time at the Austin office in the US, the Cambridge office in the UK, and I worked remotely from India. I was let go on March 27, 2024 . I had an unbelievably great time. I had three amazing mentors - Pankaj Pandey, Senganal Thirunavukkarasu, and Mark Dickinson. Pankaj mentored me in my first year at Enthought. I started paying attention to the craft of software after working with him. Senganal started mentoring me in my second year at Enthought, and continues to mentor me, even after the both of us have moved on from Enthought. He instilled professionalism in me, ensuring that the code I wrote produced precise scientific results, and that I tackled the known unknown aspects of a project first, to ensure timely communication about project progress. I was eager to manage people at the time and Senganal made me realize that I didn't want to manage ...
Read more

Arxiv author affiliations using Python

So, I wanted to get author affiliation information from papers on arXiv. arXiv provides with an API to bulk query their database and get information. Following that, I look for the attribute 'arxiv:affiliation' in the html data. Here's the code - import urllib from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulStoneSoup   url = 'http://export.arxiv.org/api/query?search_query=all:astro&start=0&max_results=1000'   data = urllib.urlopen(url).read() soup = BeautifulStoneSoup(data) #print(soup.prettify()) #list = soup.findAll('arxiv:affiliation') #for i in range(len(list)): #        print list[i].contents   test = [tag.string for tag in soup.findAll('arxiv:aiffiliation')] Now, the problem I'm having is that I'm getting affiliation of all authors which I want to split into sets of affiliations of authors of a paper, which I'm stuck on at the moment. Once I get that part, I can move on to the next part of this pet project, displaying these...
Read more

Elementary (particle physics), my dear Watson

Ground Control to Major Tom:  Shruti Patel checking in. Since my dear friend and fellow-physicist Rahul Poruri is homeward bound, and shall remain there for a week, I'm stepping in to continue his tradition of daily posts to Astronut . Even as I write, I'm not quite sure what this post is going to be about, so please forgive me for occasional rants and digressions.  By the way Rahul, I totally resent you for the name of this blog- I'm never going to start my own blog because there's no way I'll come up with a name as cool as Astronut! For now, I shall try and be happy with being a guest writer! Before I begin, a little bit on who I am and what I do; so that you can trust that my general views on science- particle physics in particular- are not entirely baseless. I graduated with a masters in Physics from IIT Madras in July this year, and I'm currently working towards (an eventual) PhD with the Theory Group at the Deutsches Electronen-Synchrotron (DESY)...
Read more