GAIA Passbands

Affiliation
American Association of Variable Star Observers (AAVSO)
Sun, 08/05/2018 - 14:04

I am looking for discussion on how best or how people would prefer to look at GAIA passbands.  Either the passbands defined by the survey or transformed to Johnson/Cousins and / or Sloan.  For the latter and additional details see this paper GAIA Data Release 2 Photometric content and validation

By way of background, I found the GAIA DR2 survey and public access to the data interesting.  I downloaded the half million objects GAIA found as "variables" and cross-matched it to the half million variables in VSX.  As I began to explore the intersection and differences, I found myself frequently going through a multistep, manual process to load the GAIA epoch photometry into VStar.  This gave me the incentive to try my hand at a VStar plugin to simply the process. 

So basically, I am looking for suggestions on how others would want this plugin to handle the passbands.

You can see in appendix A of the GAIA paper the transformation they recommend.  Also you will see in section 7 that the GAIA team have cross-matched agains APASS and report good correlation.  I suppose this validation involved the transformations.  If anyone was involved with this validation and cares to elaborate, please do.

Thanks in advance for you thoughts and suggestions,

Cliff