Pulsar Software

  • Virtual Box: A downloadable virtual box with basic pulsar sofwares
  • Psrchive: A versatile software to analyse pulsar astronomical data
  • Tempo2: A widely used high precision pulsar timing tool
  • DSPSR: A library for digital signal procession of pulsar astronomical time series
  • PSRCAT: A web based application that catalogues all the radio pulsars.
  • ENTERPRISE: A pulsar timing analysis code for noise analysis, gravitational wave searches, etc.
  • PINT: Another tool to time pulsars, based on python and modern libraries.

Workshop Material

UCT/Meertime Pulsar Timing workshop

A two-day hands-on workshop held ahead of the MeerKAT@5 conference at SAAO in Cape Town, with lecturers from the Meertime collaboration, SARAO and UCT. Lecture topics included introductions to pulsar timing science and gravittional wave astrophysics, with tutorials making use of pulsar reduction software (psrchive) and GW search software (enterprise). More details can be found on the meeting website. This meeting covered similar content to NWU workshop listed below. For lecture recordings please instead refer to the NWU workshop.

NWU/UCT/Swinburne Pulsar Timing workshop

All the content and recordings of an in-person pulsar timing workshop, held at North West University in September 2023, with invited lectures from the Meertime collaboration, as well as from NWU and UCT, can be found on this website. Students were guided through introductory materials on pulsar data analysis, including how to do RFI cleaning, data decimation, and how to create pulsar time of arrivals (using psrchive) to thereafter obtain timing models for a pulsar (using tempo2). They were also introduced to sofware used to search for nanoHz gravitational waves in Pulsar Timing Array data (called enterprise).

MeerKAT online Pulsar Timing Workshop

This two-day MeerKAT workshop, held in September 2021, provides an introduction to pulsar timing through lecturing and online tutorials. You can view the lectures, tutorial and data on the SARAO E-learning platform

SARAO E-Learning portal and YouTube Channel

The SARAO E-learning portal hosts an array of online videos, that can also be viewed on the SARAO Web YouTube Channel.This includes an introductory course in Radio Interferometry under the African Radio Interferometry Winter School material.