Fabian's Astrophysics Website

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 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 …

As of 2024, emails are typically received through Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) servers, where the individual emails are kept in a centralised storage. This has the advantage that you can access them from several email clients or devices and always see the complete set of emails in the same …

So far, I have always maintained my publication list manually as a LaTeX file, adding new publications as they were accepted or made public. However, doing so was an extremely tedious and frankly dull task, more so because some application processes require you to submit separate lists that include all …

I recently uploaded our scatfit pulse profile scattering fit and simulation software to the official Python Package Index (PyPI). That means you can install it simply by typing

$ pip install scatfit

in one of your shell windows.

As scatfit includes compiled binary extensions to speed up the model evaluation (by …

I recently published software for performing scattering fits of time domain radio signals from Fast Radio Bursts or pulsars on the Astrophysics Source Code Library (ASCL). Please find its description below.

Impulsive time domain radio signals, such as Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) or pulsars pulses, undergo several propagation effects in …

I recently published some of the educational material online that I used to solve various example problems or to demonstrate different software programming concepts. The material collection so far contains four example projects that range from plotting a modified parabolic function to a simple Bomberman-inspired video game.

I primarily …

Late last year, I released the high-level observing software used for the UTMOST pulsar timing programme I paper through the Astrophysics Source Code Library. It contains monitoring and scheduling tools that we developed as part of the UTMOST project for the Molonglo Observatory Synthesis Telescope (MOST), including the fully-autonomous dynamic …

Today I participated in the 2019 machine learning hack night at Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics at the University of Manchester. A completely unknown machine learning and data analysis challenge was presented, together with previously unknown Python tools that were useful for analysing the data. This year’s challenge was …