Pulsar VO Project Tracker

The Pulsar Virtual Observatory (VO) project is an endeavour to make publicly available the data from two large pulsar surveys done with the Parkes radio telescope: the 70-cm Southern Pulsar Survey, and the Parkes Multibeam Pulsar Survey.

The first software aspect of this project is to convert the survey data into a standard format that will be widely understandable. This will be the PSRFITS format, a variant of the FITS standard specialised for pulsar data structures but readable by anything that can read a FITS file. This stage has involved the creation of a number of programs, accessible in the usual pulsar filesystem:

• pvoconvert -- Convert PKS format survey observations to PSRFITS format.
• pvosummary -- Summarise the positions, observation date/time, frequency of PSRFITS files, with the ability to produce a csv file listing a range of useful metadata.
• pvoconesearch -- A command-line tool to search for PSRFITS files that cover sky within a specified radius of a specified position.

The second aspect will be constructing a web service that will be able to query and search the data set, and making this available through VO services. This will build on the work done by Albert Teoh in constructing the web archive, and extending this to provide VO Cone Search queries that return VOTables.

Progress

June 21: The page ToDo has a table showing what tasks need to be done, and who is responsible. This page can be edited if needs be.

I've also started a document that details various aspects of the implementation of the archive and the VO queries: see source:trunk/docs/VOimplementation.pdf​

Authors:

• Matthew Whiting

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To see the stuff that used to be here, go to OldTracIntro.