Here we give a few advises regarding the writing of a report within the scope of the astrophysical lab course. We aim to give an overview over what should be included in those reports and which guidelines need to be followed.

A typical report should consist of the following sections:

1. a theoretical part that explains the background need to understand the topic of the report
2. a general description of the observation, the data reduction, and the data analysis
3. the presentation of the results
4. a discussion of the results with respect to literature values, plausibility, uncertainties, and possible error sources
5. a reference list

Some general remarks:

• first of all: use your own words
  • Please be aware that the supervisors (which will evaluate your report) already read dozens of other reports. Hence, they will immediately recognize whether you have copied text from e.g. the Internet, which is considered to be a plagiarism and which will result in an immediate disqualification.
• state the origin of each figure that is not made by yourself
• the report should include the figures from the data reduction, however only one example of each type is needed in the main part of the report, additional figures should be attached as an appendix

An example for a good, although not perfect, N2 report can be found here (many thanks to Tomer Shenar and Christoph Guber for providing this file).