Accepted Oral Presentation Guidelines

Congratulations on having your abstract accepted for a presentation at the 112th AAVSO Annual Meeting! On this page, you will find information about deadlines as well as tips for preparing your slide deck. Please review these instructions carefully. If you have any questions, please contact Lauren Herrington (lherrington@aavso.org).

Instructions

  1. Register for the Annual Meeting before Sept. 20, 2023. [Deadline passed]
  2. Create your slide deck.
    • You will have 15 minutes for your presentation (plus another 5 at the end for Q&A), so using the classic “2 minute rule”, 7 slides is a good target.
    • Please use a 16:9 ("widescreen") aspect ratio.
    • To ensure that your content does not run off the edge of the projection screen at the hotel, it is a good rule of thumb to place all important content at least 1 inch away from the edges of your slides.
  3. Save your slide deck as PowerPoint format (.pptx).
    • In-person presenters, please use the filename format "[Your last name]_inperson23.pptx".
    • Remote presenters, please use the filename format "[Your last name]_remote23.pptx".
  4. Email your final slide deck to Lauren Herrington (lherrington@aavso.org).
    • The deadline for remote presentations is October 18 @ 11:59 p.m. ET.
    • The deadline for in-person presentations is October 23 @ 11:59 p.m. ET.
    • Please use the filename as your email's subject line.
    • Include your name within your email, as well as any contact info which you wish to provide to the public.
  5. Email an audio-inclusive version of your presentation to Lauren Herrington (lherrington@aavso.org).
    • This is not a requirement for in-person presentations, but we do encourage that you consider sending a recording for us to keep on hand as a backup just in case you need to change your plans at the last minute (e.g. due to an illness or cancelled flight).
    • Two easy ways to create a recording are to record yourself presenting to an empty Zoom meeting [instructions], or to record the audio directly into your slide deck itself [instructions].

Please be prepared to schedule a quick A/V check with Lauren via Zoom, to ensure that all necessary tech is in working order and your slideshow appears as it should.

Conference Proceedings

You have the option of preparing a full proceedings paper for inclusion in a special "Conference Proceedings" volume—Proceedings of the 112th Annual Meeting of the American Association of Variable Star Observers. Proceedings papers should be submitted to Joyce Guzik (joy@lanl.gov) by December 8, 2023.

Conference proceedings will not be formally refereed, but will be curated and edited by guest editor Joyce Guzik and AAVSO staff. In short, they should be similar to JAAVSO manuscripts in organization, with sections roughly as follows:

  • Introduction giving motivation for the work and background
  • Methods, whether observational or theoretical
  • Results
  • Discussion/conclusions
  • Acknowledgments
  • References in the same format as in JAAVSO: mentioned in the text as (author(s) date) and listed alphabetically at the end

Figures and other graphics are encouraged, but should not be much more extensive than those included in your presentation. Conference proceedings should also not include extensive data tables; those should be saved for subsequent publication in an archival journal such as the JAAVSO. Ordinarily, there will be no length limitation, although our staff will request that verbose writing be condensed.