Fabian's Astrophysics Website

Last week I attended the Pulsar and Neutron Star Entretiens 2026 meeting in Paris, which is an informal gathering of mostly French-affiliated pulsar and neutron star experts, similar to the Orange Pulsar Meeting in Australia or the SPINS-UK meeting in the UK. I much enjoyed the more interactive format …

I attended the Paris SKA conference at Paris Observatory - PSL in Meudon this week. I gave a poster presentation titled “Pulsar Radio Phenomenology and Fundamental Physics”, which summarised the key pulsar observables and some of our recent work on an approachable level, targeted at non-experts.

Here is the abstract:

In …

After an earlier wave of Zenodo submissions in February, I published my slides on absolute flux density calibrating beam-formed pulsar data from the NenuFAR beam model & polarisation meeting 2025 on Zenodo.

Here is the DOI link:

Absolute Flux Density Calibration of Pulsar Data, Paris Meudon, France

After the initial work last year, I released a new version (v0.5.0) of my scatfit pulse profile modelling and fitting software for FRBs and pulsar pulses.

This is a major feature release that implements all functionality of a multi-component mode.

This allows one to simulate and fit bursts …

In early 2025, shortly after starting my new position with Paris Observatory - PSL and returning from the UK, I was interviewed for an FRB special in the BBC Science Focus Magazine.

In the hustle and bustle of the unusually busy conference summer of 2025, I forgot to share the write-up …

I just published some supplementary data for SUSPECT Paper I on Zenodo.

This includes the integrated pulse profile of PSR B1822-09 at 650 MHz obtained from our uGMRT observations on 2023-04-23, as well as the entire dataset (8723 files) of single pulse dynamic spectrum plots in PDF format. This amounts …

In April 2025, I gave an invited review talk about FRBs called “Fast Radio Bursts: An observational perspective” at the Les Houches workshop in the French Alps, near Chamonix. This was done as part of the Feeling the pull and the pulse of relativistic magnetospheres conference, which brought together world …

This week, I published some of my recent conference slides and posters on the Zenodo website. This is beneficial because it makes them more widely available and because Zenodo assigns a static DOI to each upload. It is easy to cite and reference my conference publications this way, for instance …

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 …

There was a large coronal mass ejection (CME), a significant geomagnetic storm, and as a result, auroras were visible throughout Germany last night. Particularly at the northern coast, but also decently in Berlin. Very impressive.

Lots of great photos online (I have seen from Germany, UK, NL, DK, FR). It …

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 on fast radio bursts (FRBs) and what we know about them from an observational perspective.

Here is a local copy of my …