Talk:optical astronomy

Request for verification
Rfv-sense (informal) Astronomy using observations via telescopes that are sensitive in the range of visible light. &#x200b;— 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. &#x200b;—  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 "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)