ranges

[Clive Page]

On Fri, 2 May 2003, Alberto Micol wrote:

> Let me resurrect the idea of histograms instead of ranges.

The usual form of histogram has equal-sized bins, which doesn't match very
well with a spectrum which spans an infinite range in theory, and in
practice from, say, 100 MHz to perhaps maybe 100 EHz.

If you want non-equi-spaced bins, then a histogram is surely much the same
as a list of intervals, with the advantage of the latter that the
"bins" do not have to be contiguous.  So for instruments with
sensitivity in two or more non-adjacent bands (e.g. XMM-Newton with
optical and X-ray telescopes) you can simply have two intervals.
Expressing that with a histogram is more messy, but does not really
contain any more information.  But perhaps I mis-understood your proposal
(since I didn't have beer with my lunch, unfortunately).

Regards

-- 
Clive Page,
Dept of Physics & Astronomy,
University of Leicester,    Tel +44 116 252 3551
Leicester, LE1 7RH,  U.K.   Fax +44 116 252 3311