A modern graphical interface to pulsar timing packages

Qtip is an interactive environment for pulsar timing packages. It aims to contain functionality that is currently provided by interactive 'plugins' such as 'Plk' for tempo2, while allowing for direct access to the powerful Python shell in which all the pulsar objects are available. Ever found yourself wanting to do something simple with tempo or tempo2, only to find yourself programming for half a day? Ever found yourself in pain because of the old PgPlot library? Or have you ever accidentally lost work because there is no 'undo' button in plk? Qtip might just be what you have always wanted!

Recently, many pulsar timing tools have been developed in Python. Libstempo can be used to access tempo2 from within Python, and PINT is well underway in becoming a full timing package developed from scratch. Qtip aims to be the standard interface for these packages. Its GUI is developed in (Py)Qt, and emulates the behavior of the plk tempo2 plugin. If you know how to use Plk, you can use Qtip. But Qtip is more. It contains a full IPython console, which gives direct access to the PINT/libstempo objects. And it can easily be extended to include other Widgets.

DISCLAIMER

Qtip is still in the very early stages of development. The plk emulator has basic functionality, so it is possible to solve pulsars, but it is nowhere near feature-complete. If you are interested in helping out you are encouraged to fork the project on github!

Requirements

• Python 2.7 (no Python 3 yet...)
• numpy
• tempo2
• libstempo or PINT
• scipy
• matplotlib
• PyQt
• IPython 2.0
• pygments
• pyzmq
• jdcal

Screenshot