LaTeX

LaTeX is the standard tool for writing papers, and pretty much all other documents, in astronomy as well as most mathematical and physical science fields. You have to submit your lab reports in LaTeX, as well as selected homeworks.

We will use style files provided by the American Astronomical Society (AAS), available at: http://journals.aas.org/authors/aastex.html These are installed on data processing computers in the Astro Computing Lab.

An example LaTeX document is example.tex in this repository, along with references.bib as example references file. You will also need sofi_composite_2_crop.jpg to compile without errors. To compile this document, execute the following from the command line:

pdflatex example.tex
bibtex example
pdflatex example.tex
pdflatex example.tex

Running multiple times is necessary to correctly place all the references - something that LaTeX can automatically keep track of. On uhura, you can view the resulting pdf file using evince or okular.

A fairly extensive example file specifically for the AASTeX package is sample61.tex.

These are only example files to get you started; there is a lot of information on LaTeX on the web, e.g. https://www.latex-project.org/

Online LaTeX editors

Overleaf and sharelatex provide convenient web-based LaTeX editors. Most astronomical style sheets (including the ones we use here) are available.