Astropulse: A Search for Microsecond Transient Radio Signals Using Distributed Computing. I. Methodology

Understand

We are performing a transient, microsecond timescale radio sky survey, called "Astropulse," using the Arecibo telescope.

• Astropulse searches for brief (0.4 {\mu}s to 204.8 {\mu}s), wideband (relative to its 2.5 MHz bandwidth) radio pulses centered at 1,420 MHz.
• Astropulse is a commensal (piggyback) survey, and scans the sky between declinations of -1.33 and 38.03 degrees.
• We obtained 1,540 hours of data in each of 7 beams of the ALFA receiver, with 2 polarizations per beam.