4 Pulsar Timing 

It became clear soon after their discovery that pulsars are excellent celestial clocks. In the original discovery paper [75], the period of the first pulsar to be discovered, PSR B1919+21, was found to be stable to one part in over a time-scale of a few months. Following the discovery of the millisecond pulsar B1937+21 in 1982 [20] it was demonstrated that its period could be measured to one part in or better [52]. This unrivaled stability leads to a host of applications including time keeping, probes of relativistic gravity and natural gravitational wave detectors. Subsequently a whole science has developed into measuring the pulse time-of-arrival as accurately as possible.

• 4.1 Observing basics
• 4.2 The Timing Model
• 4.3 Binary pulsars
• 4.4 Timing Stability
• 4.5 Going further

Binary and Millisecond Pulsars D. R. Lorimer (dunc@mpifr-bonn.mpg.de) http://www.livingreviews.org/lrr-1998-10 © Max-Planck-Gesellschaft. ISSN 1433-8351 Problems/Comments to livrev@aei-potsdam.mpg.de