PSR B1259–63: Periastron Puzzles

I was fortunate enough to have been involved with unravelling the secrets of PSR B1259-63 right from the start. The major part of my PhD thesis was a large survey of the southern galactic plane at an observing wavelength of 20 cm. Confirmation of a further batch of good-looking pulsar candidates from the data processing took place in November 1989 at the Parkes radio telescope in central New South Wales, Australia. My fellow student Jeremy Lim and I were in the control room when the 47.7 ms periodicity of PSR, B1259–63 was confirmed. At first, the slight increase in period from the original detection led us to believe we had discovered a ‘Crab-like’ pulsar. However by the end of the following year we realised we had something much more exciting on our hands.