Write a very short paper describing your investigation

Last week, you fit a simple gaussian model to measurements of a solar absorption line.

You came up with your best estimates for the parameters

C level of the continuum
D depth of the line
λ₀ central wavelength
FWHM Full-Width at Half-Maximum of the line, which is equal to 2.35 σ

Good. Now, it's time for you to go to a conference and present your work to other astronomers. Your job this week is to practice writing a short article which describes your work for a technical audience.

There are two aspects to writing a paper.

content: How much background should you include? Should you describe all the gory details of your work? Does anyone care if you used FORTRAN or MATLAB or IDL or Perl? Why is your work important, anyway?
style: What sort of headings will appear for each section of the paper? How should each reference be listed -- with LastName, FirstName, or with FirstName, LastName? How much smaller than the regular font should the captions of figures be?

Let's spend a short time talking about the content first, and then we'll show you a "typical" scheme for getting the style correct.

Guidelines for content

This paper should be very simple: your goal is to explain to other astronomers at a conference your investigation into the structure of one solar absorption line. You assumed the profile of the line was a gaussian, and found the parameters which best fit the measurements.

How good was your fit? Does it make you think that a gaussian is a good choice for a model of this absorption line? What sort of model WOULD be a good choice, based on the theory of stellar atmospheres?

Your paper should contain the following elements.

a title
an author, with affiliation
an abstract
the body: explain what you analyzed, how you did it, and what you found
a table showing the parameters of your best-fit gaussian model
a figure showing the data and your best-fit gaussian model
a bibliography with at least one reference

If you feel that additional figures and/or tables would help the reader to understand your work, please include them.

Guidelines for style: use LaTeX with standard journal macro packages

Most journals and many conferences have adopted some LaTeX "style files" for submissions. That means that you use LaTeX, together with their style files, in order to make a submission. Different journals use slightly different styles.

Astrophysical Journal LaTeX style information

Important note for using LaTeX on the Macs in Gosnell Lab:



     export PATH=$PATH:/usr/texbin

This page maintained by Michael Richmond. Last modified Sep 18, 2008.