Skip to main content

Search

Items tagged with: ScienceCommunication

Made another handy #accessibility guide, this time for your science plots!

Our plots can have lots of messages in them, so try and tell the story of the main message. Here's a guideline/template and some tips on how you can describe your plots that works for me.

Hope folks find this useful!

(I am using one of our pulsar observations to demonstrate how I have used this template in the alt-text for this image)

#Science #Astrodon #ScienceCommunication #SciComm

This is a plot of a pulsar observation, with the x-axis representing the pulse phase and the y-axis representing flux density in units of millijansky. The plot contains thre curves, one in black which represents the pulsar's profile intensity, one in red which represents the linear polarization and one in blue which represents the circular polarization. The pulsar's signal forms a sharp narrow peak around pulse phase 0.35. The intensity profile is much larger than the polarization profiles, which both form a more variant profile, rising up and down. The circular polarization even goes negative. This plot is representative of an observation for the pulsar PSR J2241-5236. Above the main plot there is also a smaller sub-plot, which shows the position angle (P.A.) data as a function of the same pulse phase, as well as degrees. The data in this plot is small clusters of data points and their error bars. The P.A. represents the orientation of the linear polarization of light from the observer's perspective. There is also text on the plot, which provides handy accessibility tips and a template for the wording to use, as this image is being used to demonstrate science plot accessibility.
#Accessibility #science #scicomm #Astrodon #sciencecommunication

⇧