An HTML Template for ASTR 410/510 Project Reports

Your Name Here

2001 June 1



Abstract

In the abstract give a one-paragraph description of what you did (what object(s) were observed, in what filters, to what limiting magnitude or surface brightness), what measurements you made from the data, and what the main scientific results are.

1. Introduction

   In the introduction you should lay out the background on your project, including motivation, previous work on the subject, the rationale for choosing the object(s) you observed, and the basic observational strategy. If your observing proposal was complete and well written, then you should be able to draw much of this section from the proposal. Avoid copying the proposal text without careful editing, however. You have already received feedback from the TAC and have also had time to think about it. Your plans probably changed a little at the telescope, and you may have realized that some things you said in your proposal were just flat-out wrong. So this text should be much better than the proposal!

   HTML text is written just as ordinary text, but you should study the source file of this document to see how paragraphs are separated, font changes are made, etc. Format your paper neatly and stick as much as possible with stylistic conventions used in the journals. For instance, if you are referring to a V band image, put the "V" in italics. However, because HTML is not designed to do complicated formatting, you will thank yourself later if you keep things simple. Symbols with subscripts are possible but cumbersome, and so you may prefer, for instance, to say in section 2 that the readnoise is 11 electrons (RMS) rather than 11 e-. If you have a relatively simple equation with no greek letters in it that you want to set off from the main text, you can do it like this:

(n2/n1) = (g2/g1) e-E/kT.

But if you look at the source for this document you'll see what a pain that is. If you need to have a complicated equation you'll want to do this:
  1. Write the equation in a TeX or LaTeX document and generate a postscript file, or use the equation editor in Word;
  2. If you created a postscript, display it with ghostview;
  3. Use xv or some other graphics application to grab a little rectangular region around the equation and save it as a jpeg or gif file;
If all goes well you'll be able to incorporate the image like this:

It's worth being aware that there is a LaTeX-to-HTML translator called 'latex2html' that will do all of this automatically. It is difficult to use, but if you have complicated equations or tables it could be advantageous to write your report in LaTeX, then translate it and edit the resulting HTML by hand. This route is not recommended, but if you want to try it, be sure to use the "-split 0" option of latex2html to put your whole document on 1 HTML page.

2. Observations

   In this section you describe what you did at the telescope. Consult any published observational paper for examples of how this section is written. Typically they start like this: "NGC 8502 was observed using the 0.25 meter Great Ohio Telescope on 2001 April 1 UT. Conditions were not photometric, and most exposures were taken through thin cirrus..." You should report succinctly but completely on all of the exposures taken for your project, including calibration frames. Include all conditions that could have an effect on the outcome, for instance, CCD temperature, dismounting/remounting the camera, zeros done days later, changing sky conditions, guiding problems, etc. A standard way to describe exposures is: "4 x 300 s in V and 5 x 300 s in I."

3. Reductions

   Explain the reduction steps that you went through to process your data. It is not necessary to name IRAF tasks or cite specific parameter settings for the basic reductions, but you should explain in words what occurred; e.g., "The eleven zero frames were combined and used to explicitly zero-correct the flat-fields and darks; the flats were then dark-corrected using the combined dark frame." When you get past flat-fielding you should become gradually more specific about what you did, e.g., what tasks and (non-trivial) parameter settings you used to clean out cosmic rays, register your frames, do aperture photometry on your standard stars, etc. This section should clearly lay out the path you took from the telescope to the science results that you are going to present in the next section. If there are particular reduction issues that are especially pertinent to the science (e.g., you know that you are seriously affected by a bizarre point-spread function), you may choose to include one or more figures here.

4. Results

   Here is where you present the scientific results. A good way to start is by presenting your best, most photogenic depiction of the fully reduced data. This may be a trimmed, co-added image in one filter, or a false-color composite, or something else. An example is shown in Figure 1. You should always discuss the meaning of every figure in the main text, and not rely on the figure caption to make your point. From there, go on to the scientific measurements that you have extracted from the data. How you present this will, of course, depend on your project, but you will probably be making liberal use of figures.
Figure 1. The figure caption is for defining in detail what the figure is and for elaborating on any important details not described in the main text. This example shows basically the way the journals do figures. They make a big version and a little version of each image. (You can use xv to shrink any large image, then save the shrunk version as another file.) The little version goes in the main paper with the caption. The thumbnail image itself is a hyperlink -- in the journal the link is to another HTML document that contains the big image and the caption; the example here is simpler and the link is just to the big image.

   If your figure is simple enough that it does not need to be seen in extra-large format, then you can forego the hyperlink to the large version. An example of a simple plot without a hyperlink is shown in Figure 2. As you can see, depending on the length of the caption, this may or may not be an effective use of space.
Figure 2. This is a picture of a pear.

   You'll find it an annoyance that HTML's standard font tables do not contain a "plus or minus" symbol. If you don't find it an annoyance it means you're probably not doing your job, because no quantitative measurement is complete without an error estimate and your report is not complete without a proper error analysis. Be sure you do not omit this essential ingredient! (For tricks on how to get special symbols, see Anca Constantin's 2001 paper.)

5. Discussion

   In the final section, put your results into context. Compare them with other published measurements of the same, or similar, quantities. If you find significant differences between your results and others', discuss the possible reasons for the differences. Explain what your results contribute to the body of knowledge; if their value is severly limited by available equipment, discuss how the project could be repeated in a better way, or what instrumentation would be needed to obtain better results.    Keep in mind throughout your report that you need to be citing appropriate sources, as you did in your proposal. Examples of the astro-standard for citations can be found in any journal. The references you cite are listed in the "References" section as shown.

References

Hubble, E. 1926, ApJ, 64, 321
Hubble, E. 1936, Realm of the Nebulae, (New Haven: Yale University Press)
Sandage, A., Freeman, K. C., & Stokes, N. R. 1970, ApJ, 160, 831