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ANDSATNF

Parkes Pulsar Data Archive

It is National Facility policy that all observations obtained with the Parkes radio telescope are made available to the general community after an embargo period. Usually this embargo period is set to 18 months after the observation. The Australian National Data Service (ANDS http://www.ands.org.au) have provided funding to provide the means by which the pulsar data sets are archived and made available for search and download.

In order to carry out observations using Parkes, the observer first requests observing time by submitting a proposal through the OPAL system (http://opal.atnf.csiro.au). Metadata (such as the principal investigator, proposal abstract) from successful observing proposals will be made available on the ANDS website. The actual data will be made available through the pulsar access portal (http://datanet.csiro.au/dap/) which allows files to be downloaded that are not embargoed.

1.0 Data sets available for download

The following data sets are available:

• P262 young pulsar timing. In total 4598 data files exist for 616 pulsars. These data were recorded using the analogue filterbank in the 20cm observing band. Only total intensity profiles are available.

All observations are available in the PSRFITS data format. Folding mode observations can be processed using the PSRCHIVE suite of software. Search mode observations can be processed using sigproc (the most recent version) and dspsr.

2.0 The pulsar data access portal

The pulsar data access portal (http://datanet.csiro.au/dap/) is used for searching and dowwnloading the data. A user guide is available for download (userguide.pdf). Note that the CSIRO access portal also provides access to non-pulsar data. Select 'Search', followed by 'Pulsar Search' to obtain the Parkes data. As a first example we recommend typing "J" into the "Pulsar Name" box and then clicking on Search. This will provide results for all pulsar folding-mode observations stored in the archive.

2.1 Updates planned for the next release

• Downloading multiple data files

3.0 Acknowledging the data sets and the data archive

Much of the data available from the archive will be from on-going projects. Even though all data older than 18 months is out of any embargo period we request that any users contact the principal investigators making extensive use of data from a given project. Not only will this help students have sole access to their data (even if their project is lasting longer than 18 months), but each data set has its own perculiarities/issues that may need to be understood (that only the principal investigator knows about) before the data are reprocessed.

Any publication containing these data sets should refer to the original paper describing the data sets. We would also appreciate a reference to the portal used to download the data. It is a requirement of the National Facility that any publication making use of the Parkes data includes the following acknowledgement: ``The Parkes radio telescope is part of the Australia Telescope, which is funded by the Commonwealth of Australia for operation as a National Facility managed by the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO)''.

This project is supported by the Australian National Data Service (ANDS). ANDS is supported by the Australian Government through the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy Program and the Education Investment Fund (EIF) Super Science Initiative (http://www.ands.org.au).

4.0 Dealing with problems

The system is currently under development. Issues arising from the data or the access portal should be reported to George Hobbs.