GLAST launch is only 17 months away and we hope to have a large data base of accurate pulsar timing ephemeredes in place at that time.

At JD02 at the IAU meeting in Prague (15-18 August) will be (at least) the following people -- Dick Manchester from Parkes, Michael Kramer from Jodrell, David Nice from GBT, Gilles Theureau from Nançay, and yours truly (Dave Smith) from GLAST. Unfortunately few of these people will be able to come to the GLAST collaboration meeting in Stockholm (28 August to 1 September), where Roger Romani, Dave Thompson, and Steve Thorsett had hoped to hold an organizational meeting for GLAST pulsar timing.

So we're going to try to find a little time for radio timing experts to sit together in Prague to discuss 1) a list of pulsars thought to be good GLAST gamma ray candidates, how much telescope time they need, and who is doing which ; 2) how ephemeredes get from the radio astronomers desks into D4.fits files on the GSSC data servers. A report will be made in Stockholm.

Many names were suggested by Dave T, Roger R, and Steve T for a general list. I (Dave S) am new to the field so please let me know who I shouldn’t have left out (my apologies…) I know of only 4 radio timers at Prague, but I'll send this invitation to the whole list, to inform the community. The list is radio only (except for Vicki K) at this time since, to quote Roger, the "main interest now is to get the Jodrell/Parkes/Nancay piece of the puzzle locked down" by which he means, routine timing of the "bread & butter" and the "difficult but interesting" pulsars, saving the oversubscribed  telescopes (e.g. GBT & Arecibo) for special studies.

Three elements of the discussion are the following:

A) Dave T applied the ATNF cuts listed at the bottom of this page to make an updated "gamma candidate" pulsar list, here as an excel spreadsheet. 

B) Roger re-did his "TimingTriage" calculations of treq (telescope integration time required to get a good TOA) and vpery (number of visits per year required to keep the ephemeredes fresh and up-to-date), which is here as a text file and here as an excel spreadsheet.

C) We got some ephemeredes files (Tempo output) from I. Cognard at Nançay, to translate them into the file formats read by the Glast "Science Tools". We did this as a two step process: first, translate to ascii files in the format expected by gtpulsardb ; next, use gtpulsardb to add those records to a "D4" FITS file. These fits files will be on the Glast Science Support Center (GSSC) data servers. Here is a link to a brief tutorial and explanation, containing a link to our beta code.

> FOLLOWING IS CUT N' PASTE OF THE ATNF WWW EXPERT MENU:

>

> User-defined variables

>

> C1 (sqrt(Edot)/Dist1/Dist1)/5.362E18

>

> C2 Edot/Dist1/Dist1/1.2E38

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> C3 B_LC/9.8E5

>

> C4 (((W50/P0)**3)/S1400/s1400)/2.12E7

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> Sort on field C1 Order Descending

>

> Condition

> (Edot>1E34 || (sqrt(Edot)/Dist1/Dist1)/5.362E18 > 0.01)