Synergy Between Radio and Optical Telescopes: Optical Followup of Extragalactic Radio Sources

Distance measurement is a must to characterize any source in the sky. In the radio band, it is rarely possible to get distance or redshift measurements. The optical band is the most used band to get distance estimate of sources, even for those originally discovered in other bands of the electromagnetic spectrum. However, the spectroscopic redshift measurements even for fairly bright radio sample is grossly incomplete, implying un-explored discovery space. Here we discuss the scope of optical follow up of radio sources, in particular the radio loud AGNs, from the present generation radio telescopes.