After much fighting, I finally got PyFITS and numarray installed, which is what I needed to run the python script lcreate. This allows me more options when background-subtracting and adjusting my light curves.

For some reason, there are no printers installed on Spiders (my computer). I had been printing papers from my laptop, but it’s much more convenient to print plots from my Linux desktop. I need to figure out what my Common UNIX Printing System (CUPS) username and password is, if I have one.

I made a calendar of all the Swift XRT observations of this SGR, which I should have done in the beginning. I downloaded and processed the latest data from July 12 only to find that none of it was helpful.

While going back through the photon counting mode light curve profiles, I discovered that the “bursting” near the edges was no longer present after I had cut out the background. After some searching, I found that the rising of the count rate along the edges was due to the background to the right of the pulsar and not from the pulsar source itself. One mystery solved.

I could only find “bursting”, the rapid count rate rise at the end of a period of observation, in the first windowed timing data set. These high count rates appear to come from the whole detector area and not just from the source or just from the background. I don’t know what that means. I wanted to look at the spectrum of each of the 5 peculiar instances separately to see if anything was going on, but good spectral data for this particular data set appears to be missing with the exception of one narrow peak in low energies. I’m still trying to figure out why.