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Minutes of the PALFA telecon: Friday May 27, 2005
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Online: JMC,GMB,JvL,IHS,VMK,FC,ZA,MM,DRL,AL,BWS,JWTH,PCCF,RB,DJN,RR

Preliminary items:

- Paper I
Some possible minor tweaks but its ready to go and Jim will submit it ASAP

- PALFA spectrometer
Specs circulated. Please review and comment to Jim before June 3

Main agenda:

1. 1906+07

- All in agreement with need to write up discovery paper ASAP. Authorship
issues briefly discussed. DRL suggests an all-inclusive approach with
active members from both consortia. Rough estimates are that N_authors
may be up to 40.... such is life!

- Follow-up observing.

Immediate quicklook. IHS prepared to spend 20 min of her 19-h time tomorrow
night (May 27) at AO to do some L-band gridding. Scott will be able to
observe for 20-min with GBT at S-band tomorrow also, and later for longer in
July as part of data for NAIC/NRAO summer school.

Director's discretionary time. We are awaiting a response from Sixto and
Bob Brown about AO time. Zaven volunteered to take lead on a GBT DDT request.

Regular proposals. FC suggested that this is an excellent opportunity
for students to make a name for themselves. A quick poll suggested that
not many students were free at the moment and it might be better to be
lead by more experienced Palfarians. So it was decided:

AO - RR to lead proposal focussing on 1906 but also requesting time for
the other pulsars.
GBT- IHS to write a dedicated 1906 proposal
PKS- DRL to write a dedicated 1906 proposal

- Politics. Some discussion about the PALFA/PMSURV collaboration brought
about by 1906. It was generally felt that we should work together in
follow-up of this object. The use of the PMSURV database in future
should be simply if we have access to the public archive, rather than
the (private) reduced data products (see item 3).

2. Follow-up observations of other pulsars.

FC and others advocated taking ~1 hr per session out of future PALFA
survey time to get TOAs on all new pulsars. If the above proposal headed
by RR goes through, then there should be more dedicated timing time to
do this in future. DRL pointed out that if we'd been able to parcel out
pulsars to other telescopes available in the consortium, this use of
survey time would probably not be necessary. We could observe with:

Jodrell (AGL/MK - no proposal necessary)
Effelsberg (MK - no proposal initially)
Westerbork (BWS - no proposal initially)
Nancay (just missed the deadline according to RR)

Back when the consortium was formed, there was talk of a timing sub-committee
to come up with a protocol for this, but nothing really came of it. DRL
volunteered to start an email discussion between interested parties.

3. Use of PMB database in future.

Following converstations with Andrew and Michael at JB, DRL/MAM
point out that another solution would be a dedicated account at JB
where anybody could access the whole database using some simple
extraction tools. However, the general consensus seemed to be that
PALFA should obtain the 500 GB portion of the raw data in the PM survey
visible from AO. There is no problem with the data format, since both
PRESTO/SIGPROC can read it. This could be made available in short order,
if people want it. MAM volunteered to look into making the 500 GB
portion available on a portable disk for shipment.

4. Confirmation strategy for new pulsars

The VLA should be used as an archive for obtaining point sources
as candidates. As evidenced by the excellent work from Shami, Joe
and Zaven, there is expertise within the consortium to do this
and it will be useful in future.

The virtue of gridding was pointed out (better positions and s/n
as well as a period check for binaries) and it was agreed that we
should have some sort of easy procedure for confirming a pulsar
by gridding. Some investigation needs to be done here to come up
with an easy-to-use and optimal scheme (e.g. should we use L-wide
or take advantage of all 7 beams in some way?) and JMC pointed out
that this probably should be tested using non 19-hr time. Perhaps
the upcoming observing in July will be a time for experimentation.
In the short term, the gridding that Ingrid will be doing on 1906
tomorrow night will provide a zeroth order bash at how things can
proceed.

5. Status of search codes

SMR (calling from a rest stop in Kentucky!) has sent out a list
of parameters that each code needs to output for inclusion into
JWHT's mySQL candidate database. He is going to liase with people
about this offline, but expects that once this is done to be able
to start serious processing within the next month or so. He'll
be sending a 500 GB disk of data to Jodrell for copying on his
return to CV. The disk will hopefully make its way safely round
the rest of the consortium clusters.

6. Disks and data transport.

The bottom line seems to be that Arun has had to back up the p1944
data (~12 TB) from last year onto tape and not all of this has made it
up to the CTC. We need to have a plan as to how to get this data
spinning again. JMC will be looking into transport issues using JBODs,
most probably. IHS and ZA have offered to provide more LaCie disks
down at AO to help Arun with space crunches. N.B. IHS needs to buy
her disks before this can happen so she needs to know how many to get.
The 12 TB from p2030 collected so far this year, can't stay on the
raids for ever. Once the data are at CTC, people could send over
either JBODs or LaCies and copies could be made. With a copy at AO (on
tape or disk) and one at CTC we should always be safe.

7. Face to face meeting.

There are opportunties coming up in August at UBC, Sydney and China.
From what was discussed, it looks like ~3 people will be at each of
these so there is some scope for discussion. One good opportunity
for a bigger gathering is at the AAS in DC in Jan 2006, where there'll
be an ALFA session. Hopefully the telecons will keep us in contact
until then.

8. Date of next meeting

Friday July 8 at the same time!

Action items
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ALL - review spectrometer specs -> JMC by June 3
ALL - to comment on search code parameters -> SMR ASAP
JMC - to submit paper I!

ZA - GBT DDT request for 1906 (in close contact with IHS)
IHS - GBT proposal on all ALFA pulsars
RR - Arecibo proposal on all ALFA pulsars
DRL - Parkes proposal on 1906

DRL - to get started on the 1906 paper and ponder the authorlist

DRL - to start an email discussion about the timing sub-committee

MAM - to look into logistics of a 500 GB copy of the AO/PM overlap

SMR - to liase with other search code people about parameters/formats
SMR - to send LaCie to Jodrell for COBRA copy

JMC - to oversee data transport issues from AO->CTC and beyond?