Archival Data

Source of the Archival Data

Vela observations were commenced MJD 57874 (1st May 2017 UTC).  The purpose of those observations was to see if an amateur radio astronomer could detect a 'glitch' in the pulsar.

Side Note: After 20 months of daily observations, on the 1st February, 2019, the HawkRAO system detected a 'glitch' in the Vela Pulsar. It is believed this is the first ever detection of a pulsar glitch by an amateur radio astronomer (refer to ATel # 12466).

The observations are conducted at an observation frequency of 427.5 MHz to 436.0 MHz in a bandwidth of 2.4 MHz. The raw IQ binary data acquired by the RTL-SDR dongle hardware amounts to about 17 GB/hour.  The large data size has meant that only a sub-set of the raw IQ binary has been archived.  However - all filterbank files since MJD 57874 has been archived as the size of these files are 1/10 of the raw IQ binary at a more manageable 1.7 GB/hour.

Filterbank Format

This data format is a conversion from the raw IQ binary (which is 'voltage data') into channelised power data. More details of this data format can be found in this PDF and so that detail will not be repeated here.

HawkRAO filterbank files

These files channelise the 2.4 MHz into 32 channels of width 75 kHz.  These channels are sufficiently narrow to prevent dispersion smearing at DM=68 of the Vela signal. There are about 1350 filterbank files covering the time from MJD 57874 to MJD 59250.  The number of hours observation is about 2000 hours as some of the earlier filterbank files were 2-hour observations.

These are the files which are processed searching for dispersed transients.