The Vela pulsar is the brightest pulsar at radio wavelengths. It was the object that told us (via its glitching) that pulsars were solid rotating bodies not oscillating ones. Along with the Crab pulsar is it the source of many of the models of pulsar behavior. Therefore it is of vital importance to know how far away it is, and its origin.The proper motion and parallax for the Vela pulsar have been derived from 2.3 and 8.4 GHz Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) observations. The data spans 6.8 years and consists of eleven epochs. We find a proper motion of µ αcosδ = −49.61 ± 0.06, µ δ = 29.8 ± 0.1 mas yr −1 and a parallax of 3.4 ± 0.2 mas, which is equivalent to a distance of 293 +19 −17 pc. When we subtract out the galactic rotation and solar peculiar velocity we find µ * = 45 ± 1.3 mas yr −1 with a position angle (PA) of 301 • ± 1.8 which implies that the proper motion has a small but significant offset from the X-ray nebula's symmetry axis.

A B S T R A C TWe have observed a sample of 149 Seyfert galaxies and radio-quiet quasars at 13 cm with both a 275-km radio interferometer and the 6-km compact array of the Australia Telescope. The high-resolution observations searched for the presence of compact, high-brightnesstemperature radio emission from the active nucleus. The low-resolution observations measured the total radio emission from the galaxy disc and Seyfert core and lobes. From these we draw the following conclusions. (i) Seyfert galaxies that lack compact radio cores display a correlation between radio and far-infrared (FIR) emission similar to the correlation displayed by normal spirals, albeit with greater scatter. The correlation is found to be intrinsic and is not an artefact of the richness effect. (ii) A very different radio±FIR correlation is displayed by those Seyferts that harbour compact radio cores. These tend to be more radio-loud than either normal spirals or the Seyferts that lack compact cores. The compact core emission thus seems to be responsible for the generally poor radio±FIR correlation displayed by Seyfert galaxies. (iii) The radio±FIR correlation is not signi®cantly improved by subtracting off the 0.1-arcsec (20-to 200-pc) compact radio emission from the total radio emission. This suggests that the emission from the active galactic nucleus has signi®cant structure on scales larger than 0.1 arcsec. Perhaps these structures are the`linear' radio features that have been seen previously in Seyfert nuclei.

Abstract:We report here on two years of timing of 168 pulsars using the Parkes radio telescope. The vast majority of these pulsars have spin-down luminosities in excess of 10 34 erg s −1 and are prime target candidates to be detected in gamma-rays by the Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope. We provide the ephemerides for the ten pulsars being timed at Parkes which have been detected by Fermi in its first year of operation. These ephemerides, in conjunction with the publicly available photon list, can be used to generate gamma-ray profiles from the Fermi archive. We will make the ephemerides of any pulsars of interest available to the community upon request. In addition to the timing ephemerides, we present the parameters for 14 glitches which have occurred in 13 pulsars, seven of which have no previously known glitch history. The Parkes timing programme, in conjunction with Fermi observations, is expected to continue for at least the next four years.

We have observed a sample of 157 Seyfert galaxies with a 275 km baseline radio interferometer to search for compact, high brightness temperature radio emission from the active nucleus. We obtain the surprising result that compact radio cores are much more common in Seyfert 2 than in Seyfert 1 galaxies, which at first seems to be inconsistent with orientation unification schemes. We propose a model, involving optical depth effects in the narrow-line region, which can reconcile our result with the standard unified scheme.