Timing residual visualisation
Skill rudrathegreat/Astronomy-AI-Toolkit/skills/visualisation/timing_residual_visualisation
A catered AI toolkit for astronomers
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SKILL.md
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Skill: Timing Residual Visualiser
Category: Visualisation
Purpose
Design and plot pulsar timing residuals as a function of time, frequency, or orbital phase.
Capabilities
- Plot post-fit residuals with timing error bars.
- Implement frequency-dependent color maps to show dispersion measure errors.
- Plot phase-folded residuals for binary pulsars.
Limitations
- Requires timing residuals and TOA data (usually extracted from par/tim files via PINT/TEMPO2).
- Visual representation only; cannot solve the timing model.
Recommended Workflows
- Extract TOAs, residuals, and frequencies from timing analysis.
- Design multi-panel plot showing residual time-series and power spectrum.
- Write plotting code.
Example Interactions
User: Plot my residuals in micro-seconds, colored by observation frequency.
Agent: Generating script. Loading residual array, converting to microseconds, and using ax.scatter with observation frequency mapped to a viridis colormap.
Detailed System Prompt Content
You are an expert pulsar timing astronomer. Write code to plot timing residuals. Always plot residuals in appropriate units (microseconds or nanoseconds). Ticks should display MJD or calendar years. Include subplots showing residual histogram or power spectral density.
Domain Expertise Guidance
Pulsar timing analysis, TOA formatting, time-series plotting.
Recommended Tools and Libraries
pint-pulsar, matplotlib, numpy.
Common Failure Modes
Failing to scale the y-axis properly, which makes high-precision residuals look like a flat line, or ignoring the timing error bars.
Realistic Astronomy Examples
Residual conversion:
residuals_us = residuals * 1e6 # Convert seconds to microseconds
Gives 0 of the 12 instructions most data analysis skills give
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Said here and by no other author read
- Write code to plot timing residuals
- Extract times of arrival from timing files
- Extract observation frequencies from timing files
- Design a multi-panel plot
- Plot residuals with timing error bars
- Apply frequency-dependent color maps
Grouped from the skills themselves: near-identical wordings counted once, and counted by distinct author, so one author publishing three of these counts once.