Presentation Length

Your presentation should be about 8 minutes long. This corresponds to 6-10 slides, depending on how fast you talk. After your presentation, you should allow for questions from the audience.

Presentation Content

• Background and Context: Your presentation should explain your research topic and why it is important to astronomy, as well as why it interests you. You should also explain your goals in observing your object.
• Data/Images: Show your classmates enough images and graphs to communicate what you found, without overwhelming them with information. Too many images will bore your audience, while too few will leave them confused. Showing good images and simple, yet descriptive graphs can be very powerful in conveying your findings.
• Analysis: Explain how you did your analysis in a brief but precise way. Understand that your classmates have taken the same class as you, and thus understand many of the basics of astronomy, so focus on what was unique or challenging in your project.
• Conclusion: Remember to actually say what your final result was. Discuss whether this is what you expected, if it agrees with any previous results, and what possible sources of error there were or how you might improve your results if you did a similar project.

Tips for presentations

• For a presentation of this length it is generally less confusing to have a spokesperson for the team do most of the talking during the presentation. Other group members may present a small portion of the research or field questions after the presentation.
• It is always a good idea to practice your presentation beforehand to make sure you explain your research clearly and in a logical way.
• Try to keep your powerpoint slides simple. You do not want to read sentences or paragraphs off of your slides - they should contain only a few bullet points of text so that your audience has an outline of what you are talking about.
• If you use images or information from other sources in your talk, you should reference them as you would in your paper! For images you should have a caption underneath it, but for other information you can put a list of references on a page at the end of your presentation.