Talk:optical astronomy

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Rfv-sense (informal) Astronomy using observations via telescopes that are sensitive in the range of visible light.​—msh210℠ 22:11, 29 June 2009 (UTC)

That's the sense in RHU. Isn't that more likely than the other sense, even though less likely to be used precisely? DCDuring TALK 23:23, 29 June 2009 (UTC)

Sorry: what's RHU? I only tagged it and requested verification because a (admittedly cursory) look at bgc yielded lots of examples of the other sense and some ambiguous examples, but not one example of this sense.​—msh210℠ 16:45, 30 June 2009 (UTC)

RHU=Random House Unabridged, one of the list of "Dictionaries to be Taken Seriously" and also on OneLook via Dictionary.com.

Many hits for "optical astronomy" involve the "w:National Optical Astronomy Observatories". The scientists are much more aware of the details of what can be done outside the range of visible light but using the many ground-based reflecting and refracting optical telescopes. A goodly amount of the usage aimed at normal people just makes a simple distinction between "radio astronomy" and "optical astronomy". Sometimes they try to distinguish between visible-light and optical astronomy. This is the kind of thing that we need to do, especially since Wikipedia seems to occasionally drop the ball on normal-person semantics of technical terms.

I found some quotes that show some of the kind of use I mention above. It is tedious to separate the voluminous technical usage from the other in books. Newspapers are better. DCDuring TALK 17:01, 30 June 2009 (UTC)

RFV passed. Thanks for the cites and other research, DCDuring. —Ruakh_TALK 22:21, 6 December 2009 (UTC)