Citing & Acknowledging DASCH

If you are writing a scholarly manuscript based on DASCH data, you should mention DASCH in the acknowledgments section and cite the relevant DASCH papers.

Suggested Acknowledgment Text

You should acknowledge the NSF grants that have supported DASCH using text of this form:

This work has made use of data provided by Digital Access to a Sky Century @ Harvard (DASCH), which has been partially supported by NSF grants AST-0407380, AST-0909073, and AST-1313370. Work on DASCH Data Release 7 received support from the Smithsonian American Women’s History Initiative Pool.

If you received any helpful advice via the DASCH email list, you might consider acknowledging whoever helped, or the group as a whole.

Primary Citations

The principal DASCH citation is Grindlay et al. (2012), Opening the 100-Year Window for Time-Domain Astronomy:

There is not yet a publication describing Data Release 7 in particular.

If you use the daschlab toolkit to analyze DASCH data, you should cite that piece of software in any related publications. The daschlab Python function daschlab.get_version_doi() returns a DOI that describes the precise version of daschlab that you are running, and the Zenodo webpage that you get by resolving that DOI (e.g., https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo...) includes an “Export” button that you can use to obtain a BibTeX citation record for the software. See this AstroBetter article from 2019 for some guidance on the general topic of software citation.

Additional Citations

Depending on the focus of your manuscript, it may be appropriate to cite one or more of the following articles as well.

The citation for the DASCH scanner is Simcoe et al. (2006), An ultrahigh-speed digitizer for the Harvard College Observatory astronomical plates:

Thre are two main citations for the DASCH photometry pipeline. The first is Laycock et al. (2010), Digital Access to a Sky Century at Harvard: Initial Photometry and Astrometry:

The second pipeline paper is Tang et al. (2023), Improved Photometry for the DASCH Pipeline:

The DASCH Publications page contains a more thorough bibliography if you would like to dig deeper into the literature that both describes and builds upon DASCH.