...
Date: Wed, 23 Sep 2009 11:51:20 +1000 (EST)
From: Simon Johnston <Simon.Johnston@atnf.csiro.au>
To: D.A. Smith <smith@cenbg.in2p3.fr>
Subject: Re: radio timing after Lucas, Damien, Patrick...Sounds good to combine timing and searching together. Agree.
Onto the data reduction. Patrick has this mostly automated (apart from flagging of bad data) and I think I understand how to drive it all. So I can certainly produce TOAs in a finite time after the observing. However this still leaves the actual timing itself and this is complicated, time consuming and fairly manual given glitches, timing noise, multi-freqs etc etc. I'm not sure I'll have time to do this so your suggestion of a central clearing house in Bonn sounds like a very good one. Plus it has the advantage of being able to combine TOAs from the different telescopes. I could send Aris/Lucas the TOAs and they could do the actual timing. As long as they (and Michael) are keen on this that would be great.
This brings us back to rationalising the timing list at Parkes. In some ways given you have to trek out to Parkes anyway, observing for 24 hours rather than 12 makes little difference. However shorter observing does make it possible to tack the timing onto other programs and then persuading the observers to spend an extra day there. Also (a) we could cut northern sources, (b) for some sources with low timing noise 1 month is overkill and (c) are all these sources worth doing anyway??? We have until Dec 15 to decide (next obs deadline) and by then we'll know about whether we'll be getting a good postdoc or not. Affaire a suivre as they say in France.
("Michael" for me means Jodrell Bank + Westerbrok + Effelsburg. That is, I presume that he, Andrew, and Ben will come to some joint opinion. Furthermore, Paulo Freire now being in Bonn means that Michael could, in principle, conduct a laugh-test with this known Arecibo user.)
Note that the Americans are not timing large numbers of pulsars. Only the six at GBT from the MoU, to a good first approximation. We certainly want Fernando to keep pounding away at PSR J1930+1852 (the only one of the six that we haven't yet seen in gamma-rays) as well as any others he wants to do with us (e.g. PSR J1935+2025 that is a good candidate but not covered by the MoU).
...