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Single pulse search tutorial
The goal of this page is to help the on-boarding of new students who are interesting in single pulse searches.
The tutorial uses PRESTO. Although PRESTO may not be the best for a computationally intensive pipelines, it is pedagogically useful by allowing the user to manually run each pipeline step.
Link to PRESTO tutorial in PRESTO's github repo
Note, I providing the commands outside of singularity. Run them with singularity as you prefer.
What you need
- Data: short observation of a test pulsar (MY_DATA.fil)
- Software: singularity image containing
PRESTO
Simple SP pipeline
Step 1: inspect data
Become familiar with the structure and contents of the data using waterfaller.py.
Example command:
waterfaller.py --show-ts --show-spec --colour-map='viridis' -d 57 -T 100 -t 5 --downsamp=8 --scaleindep MY_DATA.fil
Parameters to play around with:
- Turn on and off dedispersion
- Go to a different time in the file
- Change the downsample factor
- Look at data with and without independently scaling each frequency channel
Step 1: apply RFI mitigation
PRESTOs removes RFI by calculating a mask. The mask informtion is saved in a number of files, one of which can be passed to the following steps. Therefore, a new, cleaned copy of the original data file is not produced.
Example command:
rfifind -o mask_file_name -time 1.0 -zapchan N:N MY_DATA.fil
Parameters to play around with:
- Duration of processing time (-time)
- In the case of PSRFITS data: -noscales -nooffsetts
- Change thresholding parameters (-timesig, -freqsig, -chanfrac, -intfrac)
- Add channels to manually zap (-zapchan)
