2023-11-07

Owned by Bradley Meyers
Last updated: Nov 09, 2023
2 min read

Present:

  • @Ramesh Bhat

  • @Bradley Meyers

  • @Christopher Lee

  • @Chia Min Tan

  • @Garvit Grover

  • @Marcin Sokolowski

  • @Mengyao Xue

  • Shi Dai

  • Willem van Straten

  • A. Aditya

General and project updates (Ramesh)

  • Data collection fully complete

  • Chris has been exploring data quality and using it for MSP searching so there are more detections of “test” pulsars now

  • Sample of detected pulsars with MWA is now ~200 (up from 50 in 2017 incoherent census)

  • Few papers related now fully published of submitted so there’s a good basis for us to build on

  • Parul & Susmita completed PhDs and now in their new roles elsewhere

  • Proposals:

    • ASTAC (OzSTAR/NT HPC): Awarded full time in 2023B, haven’t used much of that

    • GMRT cycle 44: additional time for pulsar 5 follow-up

    • MWA 2023B: timing obs. for pulsar 3, timing checks for MWAX

  • Brief round-up of the past 5 years

  • Outlined requirements/priorities for future

Software migration to NT (Bradley) 

  • Most software required now on NT

  • Beamformer is installed and runs, but is producing nonsense

    • Can still use it to estimate benchmarks

  • Standard pulsar software is installed in a system-wide repository (/users/apps/pulsar/)

Calibration of all SMART obs (Bradley) 

  • Since we can use the calibration software on the calibration visibilities, may as well process them

  • Divided out jobs to folks, about 80% complete

  • Will make it easier once we start processing/checking

Sky tessellation for 2nd pass (Chia Min)

  • Did some more in-depth analysis of what a tied-array beam would look like at top/bottom of band

  • Allows us to estimate best way to separate beams on the sky (plus project effects)

    • Tessellate in hexagonal pattern such that FWHM touches at highest frequency

  • Calculated beams amount to ~380k for the whole sky

MSP census update (Chris)

  • Part of PhD project, looking at ~uniform depth observations of targeted MSPs from MeetTime MSP census

  • Processed ~8 MWAX SMART obs so far, moving on to Legacy data soon

  • Using PRESTO and PSRCHIVE together, helps weed out issues in processing

    • In vast majority, see pulsars in both

  • Doing incoherent and coherent dedispersion

  • pdmp output shows a sweep in time vs. phase

    • Ephemeris difference from psrcat vs. PTA is negligible

    • Makes it seem like timestamp offsets?

  • Also running RM synth on detections

    • Incorporating ionospheric values, comparing to MeerKAT value

    • Low-freq. provides much more precision, but ionspheric errors dominate

Processing documentation (Chris)

Pulsar 5 update (Garvit) 

  • Interesting story about localisation, and maybe periodic nulling?

  • Focus on MWA and GMRT imaging. Paper in prep.

Discussion on prioritisation (all)