[evlatests] Band Nomenclature

[Craig Walker]

Mark Claussen wrote:
> I will make a comment with trepidation and reluctance.
> 
> Will someone please tell me, without looking it up,
> the wavelength (or frequency) ranges for near- to mid-
> infrared bands ?   
> 
> Neither can I.   So we could say that these designations just 
> serve to mystify the non-IR astronomers. My point is that, if 
> you want to do infrared astronomy, you're very likely to learn 
> the band designations, and what wavelength corresponds to 
> what designation.  It's true they're (more-or-less) alphabetically
> ordered; not true for radio designations.   Optical designations
> are a bit better; we can guess what range of wavelengths U, B,
> V, and R are.  But, again, without looking it up, I probably
> cannot tell you what the range and effective wavelengths of 
> these standard filters are.
> 
> I don't think that we are any worse off than our colleagues in 
> different wavelength bands.   How many times have you heard
> an optical colleague say that they observed in the 4200 Angstrom
> band, as compared to saying "we observed in B" ?   And that's 
> without bringing up other (non-standard) filters that get given 
> other (confusing) designations (u, b, v, g, i, etc.).

I agree that we're not worse off.  But I get rather irritated at the 
optical/IR folks when they use these designations and I don't know what 
they are talking about.  It hinders communication.  I suspect that the 
same goes the other way.  Just because they do something unfortunate is 
not an excuse for us to not try to do something better.  Of course, all 
this applies to what we do when talking outside the radio community. 
But it's hard to resist using the internal designations.  That's why we 
went to wavelength designators on the VLBA with mixed success.  I'm not 
too concerned about our users - they will adapt.  But it is the impact 
of radio astronomy on the broader community that needs to concern us.

Cheers,

Craig


> 
> I agree with Rick --- users, no matter who they are and what 
> wavelength regime they are observing in, will need to do their 
> homework.
> 
> Mark
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