bandpasses in RM

[Patricio F. Ortiz]

Hi Bob, Nic & Arnold,

The broad categorization proposed by Bob seems to me adequate, as I assume
it will act as a "broadband filter" to categorize information. True that
radio is quite wide, but we will never please everyone as these categories
are arbitrary. What Nic mentions sounds more like an orthogonal direction.
Bob's Bandpasses apply only to the EM regime.

Individual observations will be either Electromagnetic, neutrino,
cosmic rays, gravitational, subspace, tachions :-) or whatever else.
Catalogues may contain more than one observation type (much like today
some catalogues mix Radio, optical, Xrays etc). Maybe what we should
introduce is something like:  "detectionAgent" (or an appropriate
designation), which could be something like: photons xor neutrinos xor
cosmic particles xor gravitational waves.

So far, all our data has detectionAgent = photons (given the fact that
we've thrown to the trashcan years of collecting CR events :-) :-)

Cheers,

Patricio

On Mon, 22 Mar 2004, Nicholas Walton wrote:
> Hi Bob,
>
> for future completeness I think we might need a category for
> astro-particles. here i'm thinking of neutrinos, cosmic rays,
> gravitational waves and so forth. I'm not quite sure how these fit into
> the 'bandpass concept' though but with the wide variety of data from
> 'astroparticle' observatories coming up (MAGIC, Auger, LISA, etc) I'm sure
> we need to be able to allow for this sort of data.
>
> Cheers, Nic
>
>
> ========================================================================
> Dr N. A. Walton
> (AstroGrid Project Scientist)   Tel:   +44 1223 337503
> ========================================================================
>
> On Mon, 22 Mar 2004, Arnold Rots wrote:
>
> > In principle I agree with the seven, but wonder where submillimeter
> > falls and whether radio ought to be differentiated.  I mean, otical
> > covers just one octave, while radio comprises at least 10 octaves...
> > The distribution seems rather uneven.
> >
> >   - Arnold
> >
> > Robert Hanisch wrote:
> > > I am starting to make the updates to the RM document brought about by the
> > > RFC and there is the matter of bandpass names, which we were urged to
> > > standardize and make consistent.  I remind you that now we have the
> > > following eight bandpasses as allowed values for Coverage.Spectra:
> > >
> > >   Radio
> > >   Millimeter
> > >   Infrared
> > >   Optical
> > >   UV
> > >   EUV
> > >   X-ray
> > >   Gamma-ray
> > >
> > > We have two names that are acronyms and the others not, and it does seem
> > > would should be self-consistent.
> > >
> > > How would people feel about consolidating to seven named regions, all
> > > spelled-out?
> > >
> > >   Radio
> > >   Millimeter
> > >   Infrared
> > >   Optical
> > >   Ultraviolet
> > >   X-ray
> > >   Gamma-ray
> > >
> > > Ultraviolet would "consume" EUV.  My reasoning is
> > > 1) These are broad definitions at this level; further specificity is
> > > provided by Coverage.Spectral.Bandpass and the central, minimum, and maximum
> > > wavelength elements.
> > > 2) EUV is infrequently observed; only a handful of resources would
> > > characterize themselves as specific to EUV and could still be easily found
> > > with Spectral.Coverage = UV plus other constraints.
> > >
> > > We could also include EUV spelled-out,
> > >
> > >   Extreme-Ultraviolet
> > > or
> > >   Extreme Ultraviolet
> > >
> > > but for reasons mentioned above it seems simpler to me to leave it out.
> > >
> > > Thanks,
> > > Bob
> > >
> > --------------------------------------------------------------------------
> > Arnold H. Rots                                Chandra X-ray Science Center
> > Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory                tel:  +1 617 496 7701
> > 60 Garden Street, MS 67                              fax:  +1 617 495 7356
> > Cambridge, MA 02138                             arots at head.cfa.harvard.edu
> > USA                                     http://hea-www.harvard.edu/~arots/
> > --------------------------------------------------------------------------
> >
>

---
Patricio F. Ortiz			pfo at star.le.ac.uk
AstroGrid project
Department of Physics and Astronomy
University of Leicester			Tel: +44 (0)116 252 2015
LE1 7RH, UK