 Greetings and welcome to the Introduction to Astronomy. In this video, we are going to talk about your write-up for the Solar Observations Project, which will be coming up due shortly, and describe a little bit about that. This is a major portion of your grade, so make sure you're following along the instructions I give here to help guide you to give you the best grade you can get on this assignment. Now, what are we doing with completing? Well, first of all, make sure you follow the grading template I provide. I give you the information there as to how things will be broken down. Everything necessary are given, along with the number of points each is worth. Make sure you don't miss out on easy points. There are some relatively easy things. Make sure you do the formatting the way I ask you to. So that way we'll make sure that you don't miss out on very easy points on that. Make sure the entire submission is in one file, either Word or PDF, and all the data tables and graphs must be included, and everything must be in the correct order that I give you in the template. And I will go over a little bit on each section over the coming slides. First of all, how long is this? I often get the question, how long does the write-up need to be? It really depends. There is no specific length that I'm looking for. So there is not a required length, and depending on how you format your paper. A typical write-up is around 8 to 10 pages. Here's a guide. Your title page is all by itself, and that's one page. Your purpose and methods will generally be about half a page. You have two data tables to submit yours and the one I provide, which will be two pages. Two graphs, the declination and change in declination, that's two pages. Analysis around two to three pages, about half a page for conclusions, and one page for references. So that's just a guide for you. If you're doing a lot less, if your analysis is half a page, you're not going to do well on it. You have not included all of the parts that I've asked for and have not fully answered all of the questions given for this. But let's break down each portion of this for you. And what I have, first of all, let's look at the title page in the introduction. First of all, title page must be a completely separate page and must have the title, your name, the class, the date, and the instructor's name on it. If you wish to include anything else like a picture, that's fine, but it must have those five things. It must be completely separate. It cannot be a header at the top of the first page. That will not get you any credit for that. So again, five easy points, make sure you make a title page with these five things on it and you've got five points. For the introduction, discuss your purpose. What are we trying to learn from these? Why are we making these? Not because you were forced to for the class, but what are we trying to learn from these observations? Describe how you went about how you made an observation. So how did you go about making this? What did you do? When did you make the observations? What did you use? You don't need to go through in detail for each observation, but describe at least like one observation in general. Now, next, we want to look at the data tables. Now, there's a lot of information for data tables, but most of this is broken down as to what I look for for these. A photo of every single observation is required for credit. So you do make to make sure you've saved those photos, make sure you submit those all as an appendix at the end of the project. You can also, if you want to include them with the data, that's fine, but appendix at the end will probably be a lot easier. Observations are three full days apart for credit. Now, if you've made more than 10 observations, that can be fine. But you want to skip two days between an observations. So if you've made more, that's fine. Do not delete any observations that you already submitted. Make sure you submit everything you submitted. I will look through them to decide that you've got 10 that meet the criteria. And that's a total of 10 observations needed for a full semester class. If you're in a shorter semester class, there are different numbers of observations needed for those. Again, you can always make additional observations. I will be looking for the 10. You don't decide that. You just submit everything you made. And if you submit 20 observations and some of them are too close together, I will not be penalizing for them for you. Again, submit your own data. If you submit fake data, then you will risk getting a zero on the entire assignment and or removal from the course. It just depends on the specific circumstances. Only submit the data that you submitted. Remember, this is only worth right now 15 points. I've already graded some of this during the semester. 15 points are left. So if you've only got five observations, you can still get half that credit. It's not worth risking for those few extra points that you get a zero on the entire assignment, which again is a big chunk of your grade. Again, only include observations that you made and submitted during the semester. You cannot go back and find another observation from the beginning of the semester that was not submitted during the semester. I collected them three times. Anything you submitted there is all you made during that time period. You cannot submit any new submissions there. So you may submit what you submitted during those three observations and anything made after the last submission. So any last minute ones that you made over the last couple of weeks. So I said observations not submitted during the semester will not be counted. You will not get credit for them. And again, you run that risk of me considering that that is then faking up, faking data and risking a zero on the entire project. You will not receive any credit if you use only my data for the final write up, but that's fine. If you didn't make any observations, you lose those 15 points, but you can still do the rest of the project based on my data. Make sure both data tables are turned in. My data and yours do not combine them. Do not try to make it a single data table. They have to be two separate data tables. All right, so that's the data tables. How about graphs? Again, I went over details of the graphs in these. There must be the two graphs as described in the graphing video. So if you have to go back and review that, that's fine. You must use graph paper or do a computer generated graph. Depends on how familiar you are, you're welcome to use something like Excel here, but you still have to be able to get everything labeled properly. So if you cannot label them and have them scaled as I show in the explanation video, then you may be better off doing it by hand so you get them correct. Again, the data must show my data and your observations on the same graphs. You do not do a declination graph for my data and then a declination graph for yours. You do it the way I show you in the video. Do my data, add your points where they fall on the date scale you already have set. So the graphs must show both sets of data. For my data, you would draw a smooth curve through the trend. Don't connect the dots. There could be some little glitches there due to rounding errors. Just draw a nice smooth curve through them. For your data, leave these as just points. Yours are gonna vary a little bit more, but use a different symbol or a different color, something that differentiates them from mine so I can easily tell what you intend each point to be. These will be line graphs, just like I show in the graphing video. Other types of graphs will not work for the project. It must be a line graph. Now, so that's the graphing. Now the big part of this is the analysis. Analysis being worth 50 points of the final project. And again, you're gonna need a minimum of about four to five paragraphs, two to three pages to make sure you answer everything. What did you find out? Discuss how the shadow lengths, how the altitude, what did you find from your data tables? How did these things change? What did you see in your graphs? What kind of trends did you see? Make sure you answer the sample questions that I gave you. I will be providing a link to those again as well with the final assignment. This is half the points for the analysis. They need to be answered in paragraphs. You do not want a numbered list. You do not want to number them or bullet them or anything else to be able to answer them. You simply want them written into the paragraphs of your analysis. Do not include the questions themselves in your write up. The question should be answered, but you should not be including those questions in the write up. Just give me your answers and in a regular analysis write up for these. So again, discuss your trends. How did things compare to the data that I provided? The questions again, if you look in the useful files folder, you will find those again. Half the points of the analysis don't miss these. Again, that's a very easy way to miss a bunch of points very quickly. And again, write it as a discussion of what you have learned. Do not include the question or number or bullet your answers. I simply want them written in to the paragraphs as you're writing these. Now, conclusion and references. So what do we have here for conclusions? Summarize what you found. One sentence is not sufficient. You're gonna have to write a few sentences here to be able to summarize what you have gotten out of the project. Make sure you include what you might do differently and what questions are you left with. These are not optional. You will lose credit if you don't include either of these two parts. So make sure you come up with some kind of question and some things that you might have done differently if you were doing it again. For references, three references are required. Anything that you created, if you took a photo, that is not a reference. That's something you created. You can include it. You do not have to cite a photo that you used. You don't need to cite a calculator website or anything you used to do calculations. Those are not acceptable references. Make sure they are science references. So a science website is fine. News websites are not. You will not get credit for a news website. So don't go to those. Make sure you're doing something that is scientific. It does not have to be a peer reviewed scientific paper. I'm not requiring that, but at least make sure you're going to a scientific site. NASA of course has some great sites there that you can use. There are plenty of others that are good as well. So news websites are not acceptable references for this project. You may use my lecture videos as a reference, as one reference. You may use the textbook as a reference if you use that. Then you would need at least one reference outside of those two. You can't use two of my lecture videos as two of your three references or two parts of the textbook. You can use that as one. You can use that as one, but you still got to come up with at least one more external reference. Now let's look at the formatting and the writing format. I do require a couple of different things here. I do require a header at each section. So introduction, then continue with your introduction. Data, graphs, analysis, and so on. That just separates them from me and lets me see where you intend one place to start and one to end. Again, as I said, it's got to be in one word or PDF file with everything in the correct order. Photos of your observations, put those in appendix at the end of the write-up. Make sure they're labeled so I know which one corresponds to which date if there's any questions that I need to double check those. I don't require any specific formatting, so you don't need to use specifically MLA or APA. You can use, if you're more comfortable with one, you can use that. Make sure whatever you use, you still have to follow my guidelines. My guidelines override anything else. So if you're missing something in mine, you will lose credit for it. And again, just to emphasize, do not number or bullet any portion of the write-up. Should not be written up like a homework assignment, this should be written up as more of a formal write-up paper. So let's summarize again. I recommend you, if you're looking at the data and graphs, complete them early and submit them to me by email for comments. If you have any questions as you're writing up the other project, again, email me. You have my email, send me an email, let me answer questions for you so you're not struggling with something. And that will help you minimize deductions when you submit your final project. So that concludes this lecture on the solar observations write-up. We'll be back again next time for another topic in astronomy. So until then, have a great day, everyone. And I will see you in class.