BVRIJHK Photometry: What Do the Letters Stand For?

[tony873004]

What do the letters stand for? Blue, Violet, Red, Indego?

Does anyone have a link explaining the process? Google only seems to give articles describing results from using the technique without explaining what the technique is.

 

[SpaceTiger]

What do the letters stand for? Blue, Violet, Red, Indego?

The quick and dirty answer is that those letters refer to specific wavebands in Johnson photometric systems. They run in order of increasing wavelength. The first four are optical wavebands and the last three are infrared ones. More information here:

http://www.starlink.rl.ac.uk/star/docs/sc6.htx/node10.html"

Does anyone have a link explaining the process? Google only seems to give articles describing results from using the technique without explaining what the technique is.

What process are you referring to exactly? The process of applying filters?

 

[tony873004]

Thanks, ST.

The quick and dirty answer and that link was all I needed . I was reading the journal on the discovery of 2003UB₃₁₃. ( http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0508633 ) Based on the context I had a good idea what this was, but I had never heard of it and didn't know what bands the letters represented.

It states that the brightness is highest through the R and I filters, each with a relative reflectance of 1.00. Am I correct to assume that whatever filter gives the highest value will be considered to be 1.00?

 

[SpaceTiger]

Am I correct to assume that whatever filter gives the highest value will be considered to be 1.00?

That's what it looks like, though I've never seen the term explicitly defined. I think that table is just telling you how reflective the object is in the different bands (relatively speaking).