  AGILE is a small gamma-ray astronomy satellite mission of the Italian Space
Agency dedicated to high-energy astrophysics launched in 2007 April. Its 1
microsecond absolute time tagging capability coupled with a good sensitivity in
the 30 MeV-30 GeV range, with simultaneous X-ray monitoring in the 18-60 keV
band, makes it perfectly suited for the study of gamma-ray pulsars following up
on the CGRO/EGRET heritage. In this paper we present the first AGILE timing
results on the known gamma-ray pulsars Vela, Crab, Geminga and B 1706-44. The
data were collected from 2007 July to 2008 April, exploiting the mission
Science Verification Phase, the Instrument Timing Calibration and the early
Observing Pointing Program. Thanks to its large field of view, AGILE collected
a large number of gamma-ray photons from these pulsars (about 10,000 pulsed
counts for Vela) in only few months of observations. The coupling of AGILE
timing capabilities, simultaneous radio/X-ray monitoring and new tools aimed at
precise photon phasing, exploiting also timing noise correction, unveiled new
interesting features at sub-millisecond level in the pulsars' high-energy
light-curves.
