Present:

• Ramesh Bhat
• Sam McSweeney
• Garvit Grover
• Gayatri Aniruddha
• Marcin Sokolowski
• Mengyao Xue
• Ryan Shannon
• Shi Dai
• Ian Morrison

Minutes:

Introducing Garvit:

• Intro to Garvit’s PhD project
• Will be taking over from Nick
• Nick no longer attending

General update (Ramesh)

• No new observations taken
• Changes to MWA observing semesters (2022A/2022B)
• Lightning damage – down to 80 working tiles
• 2022A pushed back to 2022-05-01
• 2022A proposals include observations for timing PSR #3 and continuing MWAX commissioning (see below)
• 2022B slated for September/October, but still might get delayed further
• Progress of SMART TBD
• Possibility of compressed campaign in October (fingers crossed), but only a small subset of orange observations
• Science commissioning for 2022A
• Extended goals, including
• Picket fence mode
• Amended target list to suit LST range (and commissioning goals, of course)
• Plans and priorities
• Existing papers → publish
• Push forward on pulsar hunting (with SMART webapp) and finish first-pass processing
• Advance MWAX commissioning
• Plan 2nd pass processing
• Follow up (timing, polarimetry, etc.) of PSR #3
• Steven Tremblay may be making a comeback (based at NRAO)

SMART webapp demo (not live) (Sammy)

• Sammy explained the SMART Web App demonstration!
• Server - was down during the presentation.
• Demo - was through screenshots.
• Back-end : Postgres database 
• Front-en : Django  
• Authentication features as well
• Possible to outsource the search for other people to login and test the candidates 
• Nearing completion Beta Version  - testing session on Monday - Beta Version 
• Manual Uploading of candidates - that is not automated yet! 
• Features :
• Data-Central - host 
• Built in features :
• Clustering/Cone Search : Cross correlating the meta information of the candidates across different beams! 
• Optimized for finding good candidates faster!
• Show Similar Known Pulsars and Similar Candidates 
• Brings the good ones - clustered to the top of the list! 
• Add notes - Apply rating/notes to every repeating candidates 

Discussion

• SD:
  • How many people rank a candidate
• SM:
  • Everyone would be able to rank the candidates 
  • Everyone’s average score would be updated accordingly - follow this list 
• RB:
  • More than 3-4 people rank every candidate
  • Encourage students for ranking to improve and encourage their learning and understanding 
• SM:
  • Looking to put Applications to scale up 
  • Deploy this product in High Schools! 
• RB:
  • Deploy and outreach in High Schools 
  • In conversations with Data Central Team to keep this in mind to accommodate this deployment within a reasonable budget with the necessary training 
• SM:
  • Need to submit an EoI by next month 
• SD:
  • New PhD Student to help join in for the Pulsar Hunting session! 
• RB:
  • Monday Evenings 6 pm : Pulsar Hunting!
  • Incentive : “Student’s Pulsar” 
  • Sammy to organize this training and testing session 

Sammy - Paper’s Update 

• J0026-1956 Paper 
• Working out of Overlead, working through the local repository 
• Referee Comments: 
  • 20 minutes of “Null”
  • Manual Single Pulse Search performed 
  • Help Needed :
  • What is pdmp doing? 
• Working on Nulling Histograms 
• Two “non-detections” processed, found some faint single pulses

Discussion

• RB: Max(SNR)
• RB: We know exactly where the sub-pulse is. Does it make sense to add one more curve to the plot - where Pulse Energy is based on the sub-pulse? May/May not be obvious to people! So, that distribution plots are informative for a large number of people! Referee is not asking for details though!

Ramesh’s Paper Update

• Survey description paper
• Using Trello for project-managing
• Includes
• detections of known pulsars (gallery!)
• figures to demonstrate tiling strategy
• Plot to compare measured vs predicted flux density (Nick’s work)
• To-do:
• Several sections to be drafted, and accompanying plots to be made
• Flux density analysis
• Subsections on PSR #2 and #3
• Survey simulations
• …
• Just need a block of time to sit down and write!