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There is nothing inherently wrong with Masa's concept of the pulsar science tools architecture and implementation. We have stacked Crab optical pulsar data over many epochs using the Jodrell monthly ephemerides that have only f0, f1, f2, and it works very nicely (ApJ 566 343-357 (2002)).

The "problems" (to the extent that there are any) is are more on the side of the timing solutions that are going to be provided to us. Masa is right that piece  Piece-wise phase-coherent ephemerides can be made, and the radio astronomers are even willing to make them for us, since in any case they'll be doing a lot of solutions specifically for us. However... they also already have a lot of high-quality timing solutions in hand, that they will continue to extend into the future, independent of GLAST. At present, Science Tools can't use those -- we have to get custom ephemerides made. To make them ourselves, you need access to the radio TOA's, which they share sparingly.

Furthermore -- if we understand correctly, gtpphase finds the best ephemeris for the whole file being analysed, and then applies it to all gammas in that file. If we're stacking photons downlink by downlink, that's fine. But in Bordeaux our tendancy has been to create a single large FT1 file for a given pulsar for a long integration time (e.g. 1 year Service Challenge simulation, et cetera) in which case you have the worst of both worlds, i.e. only 3 rotation parameters to cover a very long exposure time with a single ephemeris. We're unclear about what Standard Recommended Procedure is (sorry -- we didn't read your recent update of the Workbook, tell us if we should).

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