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• • It would be good if gtpphase users were, at a minimum, alerted to the fact that a glitch occured during the time span of the gamma rays being processed. We suggest that the TEMPO glitch flags be read from D4 and a message printed by the code. The user could then decide to shift into "expert mode", that is, phase-stack the gammas using TEMPO instead of gtpphase.
  • The rotation parameters immediately after (and before?) the glitch will be weird. You'll want to change lines in the D4 file. Watching a pulsar just when it glitches is a very rare thing, and GLAST survey mode "seeing all things all the time" means we'll catch some, including on Vela which is gamma bright enough that we may see something happen.

• • In real life -- we'll know weeks or months after the LAT data is recorded that the radio folks saw a glitch. We'll then want to come back and analyse carefully the gammas around the glitch time. Perhaps this is an example of when "expert mode" should be applied.

Summary

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)).

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