psrchive and psrfits: An Open Approach to Radio Pulsar Data Storage and Analysis

By A. Hotan, Willem van Straten, R. Manchester. Publications Astronomical Society of Australia, 2004

502 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract A new set of software applications and libraries for use in the archival and analysis of pulsar astronomical data is introduced. Known collectively as the psrchive scheme, the code was developed in parallel with a new data storage format called psrfits, which is based on the Flexible Image Transport System (FITS). Both of these projects utilise a modular, object-oriented design philosophy. psrchive is an open source development environment that incorporates an extensive range of c++ object classes and pre-built command line and graphical utilities. These deal transparently and simultaneously with multiple data storage formats, thereby enhancing data portability and facilitating the adoption of the psrfits file format. Here, data are stored in a series of modular header–data units that provide flexibility and scope for future expansion. As it is based on FITS, various standard libraries and applications may be used for data input, output, and visualisation. Both psrchive and psrfits are made publicly available to the academic community in the hope that this will promote their widespread use and acceptance.

Subfields: Computer Networks and Communications, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8bf47c6a9b461e41ce3c3a02138976e51899790d

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Citations in the corpus

Pulsar Rotation Measures and the Large-Scale Structure of the Galactic Magnetic Field (2006, methodology): “The 2003 observations were processed using thePSRCHIVE software package (Hotan et al. 2004).”
Precision Timing of PSR J0437–4715: An Accurate Pulsar Distance, a High Pulsar Mass, and a Limit on the Variation of Newton’s Gravitational Constant (2008, methodology): “All the data reduction described above was performed using the PSRCHIVE software package (Hotan et al. 2004).”
The High Time Resolution Universe Pulsar Survey - I. System configuration and initial discoveries (2010, methodology): “Then the psrchive package (Hotan et al. 2004) is used to sum the folded sub-integrations and periods with a series of trial periods and DMs around the values returned from the Fourier domain search.”
Timing stability of millisecond pulsars and prospects for gravitational-wave detection (2009, methodology): “The PSRCHIVE software package (Hotan et al. 2004) was used to perform all of the processing described above.”
The NANOGrav 11 Year Data Set: Pulsar-timing Constraints on the Stochastic Gravitational-wave Background (2018, methodology): “All data reduction was completed using PSRCHIVE6 (Hotan et al. 2004) and custom NANOGrav processing scripts7.”
LOFAR: The LOw-Frequency ARray (2013, methodology): “Several conversion tools have been developed to convert these data into other formats, e.g. PSRFITS (Hotan et al. 2004), suitable for direct input into standard pulsar data reduction packages, such as PSRCHIVE (Hotan et al. 2004), PRESTO (Ransom 2011), and SIGPROC (Lorimer 2011).”
The Parkes Pulsar Timing Array (2009, methodology): “An automated pipeline based on the PSRCHIVE software suite (Hotan et al. 2004) runs the following routines on the raw data (details are provided in Manchester et al. 2013): • The edges of the observing band are removed along with any identified radio- frequency interference • The best available…”
PULSAR J0453+1559: A DOUBLE NEUTRON STAR SYSTEM WITH A LARGE MASS ASYMMETRY (2015, methodology): “The resulting calibrated pulse profiles are then cross-correlated with the low-noise template displayed in Figure 1 using the procedure described in Taylor (1992) and implemented in the PSRCHIVE software (Hotan et al. 2004; van Straten et al. 2012).”
The NANOGrav 11-year Data Set: High-precision Timing of 45 Millisecond Pulsars (2017, unknown): “Software: PSRCHIVE (Hotan et al. 2004), nanopipe (Demorest 2018), Tempo (Nice et al. 2015), Tempo2 (Edwards et al. 2006; Hobbs et al. 2006), PAL2 (Ellis & van Haasteren 2017a), PTMCMCSampler (Ellis & van Haasteren 2017b), MultiNest (Feroz et al. 2009).”
A real-time fast radio burst: polarization detection and multiwavelength follow-up (2014, methodology): “The feed was assumed to be ideal and the calibration was performed using the pac command in the PSRCHIVE software package3 (Hotan et al. 2004).”
Detection of 107 glitches in 36 southern pulsars (2012, methodology): “Off-line data reduction used the psrchive pulsar data analysis system (Hotan et al. 2004).”
Spectral properties of 441 radio pulsars (2017, methodology): “The polarisation and absolute flux density of the observations were calibrated using the psrpl2 calibration pipeline, which is based on PSRCHIVE tools (Hotan et al. 2004).”
Shapiro delay measurement of a two solar mass neutron star (2010, unknown): “5-minute intervals using the PSRCHIVE software package[10].”
The Parkes Pulsar Timing Array Project (2006, methodology): “A simulated pulse train matching the modulation signal was then convolved with the impulse response corresponding to the channel width of the particular PDFB configuration to produce a reference template for use with the Psrchive PASA, 30, e017 (2013) doi:10.1017/pasa.2012.017 http://journals.cambri”