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PINT is a project to develop a pulsar timing solution based on python and modern libraries. It is still in active development, but it is in production use by the NANOGrav collaboration and it has been demonstrated produce residuals from most "normal" timing models that agree with Tempo and Tempo2 to within ~10 nanoseconds. It can be used within python scripts or notebooks, and there are several command line tools that come with it.

The primary reasons PINT was developed are:

• To have a robust system to produce high-precision timing results that is completely independent of TEMPO and Tempo2
• To make a system that is easy to extend and modify due to a good design and the use of a modern programming language, techniques, and libraries.

PINT has a naming conflict with the pint units package available from PyPI (i.e. using pip) and conda. Do NOT pip install pint or conda install pint! See below!

PINT requires longdouble (80- or 128-bit floating point) arithmetic within numpy, which is currently not supported natively on M1/M2 Macs. However, you can use an x86 version of conda even on an M1/M2 Mac (which will run under Rosetta emulation): see instructions for using Apple Intel packages on Apple silicon. It's possible to have parallel versions of conda for x86 and ARM.

PINT is now available via PyPI as the package pint-pulsar, so it is now simple to install via pip. For most users, who don't want to develop the PINT code, installation should just be a matter of:

$ pip install pint-pulsar

By default this will install in your system site-packages. Depending on your system and preferences, you may want to append --user to install it for just yourself (e.g. if you don't have permission to write in the system site-packages), or you may want to create a virtualenv to work on PINT (using a virtualenv is highly recommended by the PINT developers).

PINT is also available for Anaconda python under the conda-forge channel:

$ conda install -c conda-forge pint-pulsar

The above two options install the latest released version. If you want access to the latest development version, the source code, example notebooks, and tests, you can install from source, by cloning the source repository from GitHub, then install it, ensuring that all dependencies needed to run PINT are available:

$ git clone https://github.com/nanograv/PINT.git
$ cd PINT
$ pip install .

Complete installation instructions are available on readthedocs.

See the online documentation. Specifically:

• Tutorials
• API reference
• How-Tos for common tasks

Are you a NANOGrav member? Then join the #pint channel in the NANOGrav slack.

If you have tasks that aren't covered in the material above, you can email [email protected] or one of the people below:

• Scott Ransom ([email protected])
• Paul Ray ([email protected])
• David Kaplan ([email protected])

Want to do something new? Submit a github issue.

And for more details, please read and cite(!) the PINT paper.

Articles that cite the PINT paper can be found in an ADS Library. A list of software packages that use PINT can be found here.