Intro to looking for scintillation in pulsar data

The main tutorial notebook goes through the steps of creating dynamic spectra and deriving scintillation parameters from a pulsar archive. Some handy functions are found in dynspectools.py - as shown in the tutorial notebook, with these functions one can write a very simple, general script to run on any archive or dynspec without the intermediate steps

If you just want to take a quick look at a pulsar's dynamic spectrum, one can do this simply with psrplot: eg. psrplot -pj -D /xw archivename.ar

You can also create a dynamic spectrum directly uing psrflux, as eg. psrflux archivename.ar. This writes an ascii wile with the S/N in each subintegration, along with the time, frequency labels for each. dynspectools.py contains simple functions to read / write psrflux files with python

The notebook Annual_Scintillation.ipynb shows an example of a fit to annual variations in the arc curvature, deriving screen distances and velocities. I urge people who are interested in applying this to solve binary orbits to read Reardon et al 2020, and look at the scintools package.