Fabian's Astrophysics Website

This entry was first published on 2024-06-20.

For future reference, the following recipe works well to get CNRS Eduroam WiFi access working on a MacBook Pro.

Eduroam configuration website.

The linked website provides a “mobile profile” setup file, including the right certificate, which will be installed under System Settings -> Privacy …

This week, we hosted the Science at Low Frequencies (SALF) conference 2025 in Orléans.

Here is some code to time align and splice (concatenate) different frequency lanes together. It is not fully verified yet, but works very well with my LOFAR offline converted test data in SIGPROC filterbank format.

Here is its GitHub repository.

Extending the code to handle PSRFITS and DADA files should …

I generated a word cloud visualisation from my publication data on NASA ADS.

I did that using the excellent Python package wordcloud. However, it required a decent amount of data pre-processing and experimentation with the word cloud parameters. Please find the finished image below.

The font size of the words …

I recently published my new FitPDF distribution fitting software on GitHub. The FitPDF software suite fits complex mixture models of various distributions to observed data. This is useful for characterising pulsar or fast radio burst (FRB) pulse energy distributions.

FitPDF operates in a Bayesian and completely unbinned way, thereby maximising …

Most of the Nançay/Orléans pulsar and transient team, along with myself, attended the Pulsar 2025 conference in Sardinia this week. The conference was a success and overall a great experience.

Here is a strongly compressed PDF version of my poster about single-pulse modulation properties with the SUSPECT project multi-frequency …

Today’s total Lunar Eclipse was unfortunately not visible from east Orléans due to thick storm cloud cover. The situation was similar in other parts of the city and its surroundings.

I recently presented our work on the Sub-GHz Radio Pulsar Emission - Lessons Learned and Predictions for SKA at the SKAO General Science Meeting in Görlitz, Germany. This included some of our NenuFAR Pulsar Census results and some work done as part of the SUSPECT project.

Here is a local copy …

I did a quick skim through my photo archives and uploaded a few more telescope photos to my telescopes page.

Enjoy!

My scatfit pulse/FRB simulation and scattering fit software recently gained the capability to simulate and fit pulses or bursts that consist of multiple components. Before that, the software was limited to profiles that a single exponentially modified Gaussian component could well describe.

The screenshots below show a simulated 2-component …

I recently presented our current work from the SUSPECT project at the Les Houches conference in the French Alps near Chamonix.

Additionally, I gave an invited review talk about fast radio bursts (FRBs) and what we know about them from the observational side.

Here is a local copy of my …

This week, I participated in a busy day at Paris Meudon focused on calibrating data (beam model, polarization, pointing, flux densities) from the NenuFAR radio telescope. I gave a short presentation about my work on absolute flux density calibrating data from various radio telescopes, including NenuFAR, uGMRT, and LOFAR.

Here …

Our paper on FRB optical constraints was accepted for publication in the journal MNRAS!

Our SUSPECT project overview paper (paper I) was accepted for publication in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics (A&A)!

Please find the abstract and selected plots from the paper below.

Context. Radio pulsars exhibit a plethora of complex phenomena at the single-pulse level. However, the intricacies of their radio emission remain …

Our paper on FRB multiwavelength constraints was accepted for publication!

Over the weekend, I created a website for our SUSPECT (Science Using Single-Pulse Exploration with Combined Telescopes) pulsar observing project. In this project, we characterise and try to understand the wideband pulsar radio emission with high-sensitivity multi-frequency observations obtained from several radio telescopes in Europe and India. We aim to …

I recently attended the AstroRadioFr24 conference at the École normale supérieure (ENS) in the heart of Paris, where I presented two talks about radio pulsars and fast radio bursts (FRBs). The conference also aimed to prepare the French radio astronomy community for the arrival of the Square Kilometre Array (SKA …

I maintain a software tool called scatfit, which I designed and implemented in 2022 to perform scattering fits of very low-S/N fast radio burst (FRB) data. Its primary aim is to measure the scatter broadening incurred by a radio signal (impulse) as it traverses various Galactic and extragalactic turbulent …

The comet C/2023 A3 Tsuchinshan-ATLAS is nicely visible from central France. The best time to observe it currently is shortly after 20:00 CEST, i.e. about 50 minutes after sunset and roughly 30 minutes before it sets.

It becomes visible in the West at low elevations above …

We had the Fête de la science 2024 science festival at the CNRS research campus in Orléans this weekend, 5 - 6. October. Each of the institutes on the CNRS campus presented itself and its research activities to the public in a simplified and (hopefully) entertaining way.

The LPC2E institute, which …