LaTeX - anjavdl/PHY517_AST443 GitHub Wiki

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.

Online LaTeX editors

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

Style files

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 the computers in the Astro Computing Lab.

An example

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 and aastex631.cls to compile without errors.

Running locally

If you are not using an online LaTeX editor (see above), you need to compile the document yourself. On a Unix system, 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 the lab computers, you can view the resulting pdf file using evince or okular.

More examples

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/