An optical pulsar is a pulsar which can be detected in the visible spectrum. There are very few of these known: the Crab pulsar was detected by stroboscopic techniques in 1969, shortly after its discovery in radio waves, at the Steward Observatory. The Vela pulsar was detected in 1977 at the Anglo-Australian Observatory, and was the faintest star ever imaged at that time.
Six known optical pulsars are listed by Shearer and Golden (2002):
| Name of pulsar | Magnitude (B) |
|---|---|
| Crab Pulsar (CM Tauri) | 17 |
| Vela Pulsar | 24 |
| PSR B0540-69 (in the Large Magellanic Cloud) | 23 |
| PSR B0656+14 | 26 |
| PSR B0633+17 (Geminga) | 25.5 |
| PSR B1509-58 (*) | 25.7 |
| * | |
Famous quotes containing the word optical:
“It is said that a carpenter building a summer hotel here ... declared that one very clear day he picked out a ship coming into Portland Harbor and could distinctly see that its cargo was West Indian rum. A county historian avers that it was probably an optical delusion, the result of looking so often through a glass in common use in those days.”
—For the State of New Hampshire, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)