I am still working on writing a paper. My hope is to have another draft out to my collaborators by the end of the week. Over the last two days, one of the major time investments has been making figures. They are deceptively difficult to do well (and I am sure I haven’t yet mastered that). Figures are generally the best way of showcasing data, whether it be showing images, the amount of energy emitted by an object as a function of wavelength, or showing trends in properties of objects. (“A picture is worth a thousand words”).

One of the difficulties is making a figure which conveys a lot of information in the most clear, eloquent way possible. And, it has to be legible. That last part is what I am struggling with now. I have a format for images of each galaxy in my sample which fairly clearly shows what I want (how the source looks on the sky and how the gas is moving in the galaxy). The difficulty is compressing all that information into a figure which doesn’t take up a whole page, but still allows the reader to see the labels on the graphs. It is a fine balancing act.. too small a font and it can’t be read, too large a font, and everything overlaps and it can’t be read.

But, after a few more hours of time investment into them, I think the figures will be ready to do. Which is good, because I want to have a poster draft done by Thursday morning too….

Most of work this week has focused on astronomy without much interaction with actual data. A very important part of scientific progress is writing up and publishing your results. This allows you to share discoveries with the rest of the community and advances the overall amount of knowledge.

I am near the end of several projects I have been working on lately, which means it is time to write up the results to be published. You can almost think of it as a lab report on steroids. The format can vary a bit with the author’s writing style, but papers generally include background of the topic, some information on the methods of data collection and analysis, some presentation of the data and then conclusions based on the data.

Once the paper has been written and the draft is thought to be suitable by the collaborators on the paper, it is submitted to a journal. Once it is received by the journal, it undergoes a peer review process before it is (hopefully) accepted and published. I will go into a bit more detail on those phases once I reach that stage with these papers.

Currently I am collecting the data, images and some existing text to merge into a document discussing the results. In this particular case, there is a sample of ~6 objects for which we have data. The paper will discuss the selection method for the objects, how the radio data was converted into usable images, and finally, what we have learned from the data. There will be a small subsection on each object, with another section about the collection of objects.

Currently I have a skeleton draft (written with the help of a collaborator on this project). I have spent some time over the last few days expanding the draft. Next up is to make some publication quality images and graphs displaying the data we’ve gathered. But now, back to writing! I will have more on the other parts of publishing papers as soon as I have finished writing this draft