Einstein@home and "Stellarium". A match made in the heavens
15 Jun 2012 21:41:02 UTC
Topic 196397
(moderation:
...A couple months ago I talked to Bernd M about being able to post any or all Einstien@home discoveries in/on
"Stellarium"..An open source astronomy program that is so rich in detail and information..When I log on to "Stelarium", literaly, hours go by, reading and absorbing all the information it has to offer..
.....Could someone from E@home talk to the folks over at Stellarium to see if they could add Pulsars to their catalog...I think it would be beneficial addition to both programs...
....In my opinion, Stellarium is (almost) as fascinating as let me know what you think...I am at www.mixednutsduo3@yahoo.com....John Huisman or atE@home
Einstein@home and "Stellarium". A match made in the heavens
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Currently as part of a number of matters, including screensaver development, we are looking at generating/maintaining an IOVA VOTable derived format ( an XML schema ) for E@H discoveries which could well be suitable for all manner of inter-operability. I'll have a look at Stellarium ( ie. it's public code base especially ) and see what might be what, but I personally can't give it much attention just right now. Thanks for the heads up! :-)
Cheers, Mike.
I have made this letter longer than usual because I lack the time to make it shorter ...
... and my other CPU is a Ryzen 5950X :-) Blaise Pascal
Hi John, I've played
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Hi John,
I've played around a bit with Stellarium yesterday. The latest version has already a built-in "Pulsars plugin". It displays the position of known pulsars in the sky and shows additional information by clicking on the pulsar markers. You can activate the plugin in the "Configuration Window -> Plugins -> Pulsars", just tick the box at the bottom.
The database for the plugin is obtained from the ATNF catalogue of known (i.e. published) pulsars, that so far contains only two of the Einstein@Home discoveries. There is however an easy way to patch the catalogue file of the Stellarium pulsar plugin so that it will also show the Einstein@Home discoveries as well.
You can download an augmented version of the pulsar plugin catalogue here. The plugin catalogue is a simple plain ascii file, so you can actually use a text editor to read it.
You now have to replace the current plugin catalogue with the updated version. Make sure the keep a copy of the old catalogue as well, if you want to revert to the status quo. Stellarium stores the file called catalog.json in different places, depending on your operating system. On Mac OS X it is ~/Library/Application\ Support/Stellarium/modules/Pulsars/. According to the documentation of the pulsar plugin, on Windows 7 and Vista it is in C:\Users\UserName\AppData\Roaming\Stellarium\modules\Pulsars and in C:\Documents and Settings\UserName\Application Data\Stellarium\modules\Pulsars on Windows XP. On Linux it should be in ~/.stellarium/modules/Pulsars. Replace UserName by your actual user name on the computer.
Once you've located the file, copy it to some safe place and put the downloaded file in the correct directory on your system. The next time you start up Stellarium you should be able to see the Einstein@Home discoveries, search for example for "PSR J2007+2722", the first radio pulsar found by Einstein@Home. If you did everything correctly, then you should be able to see something like the following, when you zoom in and highlight PSR J2007+2722
Note, that there's another Einstein@Home discovery (J2005+26) right next to J2007+2722. In the current version of the updated catalogue I've simply added "(E@H)" to the names of all pulsars that were discovered by Einstein@Home.
There are for example three discoveries made in the Parkes Observatory data in this region of the sky in the constellation Sagittarius (the archer), which features a lot of other pulsars as well. Look for J1755-3331 on the far right near the open cluster, J1748-30 just left of the arrow tip and J1750-2534 on the left.
Cheers,
Benjamin
Einstein@Home Project