Me: This is so tedious!
Sandy: Welcome to our world.

I don’t know why I dared to say I was nearly done with light curves and spectra – I knew I’d jinx myself. Sandy pointed out that I wasn’t looking at the light curves at the smallest binsize, so I was missing a lot of the details; a single high count could actually be several high counts in a rise and decline. I again looked though all the pc observations and found nothing new, but it turns out that the wt light curves contained a lot more burst candidates than I thought. I tried to locate them all, but I began to realize that I don’t have a systematic way of classifying a burst. Until I define what a burst is, I can’t go any further with the wt analysis.

Another mistake I made was not realizing that xspec has two blackbody models. The one I had been using, bbody, is used for typical stellar blackbody modeling. The one I should have been using, bbodyrad, is used for compact objects, such as this pulsar. I remodeled all of the pc spectra. The results were only slightly different, but noticeable. I was more careful this time in determining which parameters and values produced the best fits.

Earlier this week I attempted to run the FFT script again and, for the most part, the processes did run much faster (with the exception of one trial which took over an hour to complete). I reminding myself that the period is 5.16 seconds, so I don’t need to look at the power spectrum with anywhere near the maximum number of bins, so my FFTs should run quickly. However, I was unable to find a strong signal above the noise. Sandy suggested I take only a small portion of good, continuous observation to feed into the FFT, but I had no success with that method either. I’m not sure how to maximize my chances of seeing a signal. If I can’t measure the known spin period of a pulsar, I don’t know how I can detect any possible period in a GRB afterglow.