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Sunspot Positions and Areas from Observations by Cigoli, Galilei, Cologna, Scheiner, and Colonna in 1612 – 1614

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Abstract

Digital images of manuscripts stored in the Galilean collection of the Central National Library of Florence are analyzed to obtain sunspot groups, their areas and heliographic positions. Overall, 142 drawings were processed. The way of drawing is usually schematic resulting in area uncertainty which may exceed a factor of two for small sunspots. We suggest that there is an upper limit of a factor of two between sunspot group numbers from the drawings and the actual ones. The computed penumbra-to-umbra ratio is consistent with modern observations. A distribution of sunspot latitudes versus time is reconstructed by means of two methods: exploiting the observation time noted by an observer and minimizing the day-to-day variability of sunspot latitudes.

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  1. calsky.com (the project has been closed on October 2020).

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Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Federico Spada for translating Latin and Italian texts by Colonna and Welser. We use data from the Royal Greenwich Observatory, United States Air Force, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (RGO/USAF/NOAA: solarscience.msfc.nasa.gov/greenwch.shtml), the database by Hoyt and Schatten (1998) provided by the National Geophysical Data Center (NOAA/NGDS: ngdc.noaa.gov/stp/SOLAR), historical manuscripts from the Collezione galileiana della Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale of Florence (museogalileo.it/en), the Austrian National Library (onb.ac.at), the Bibliotheque municipale de Lyon (bm-lyon.fr), the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Roma (digitale.bnc.roma.sbn.it/tecadigitale), Harriot’s drawings of sunspots from the Cultural Heritage Online, vol. VIII: spots on the Sun, HMC 241 VIII (ECHO: echo.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/content/scientific_revolution/harriot/harriot_manuscripts, and the CalSky Project (calsky.com) by Arnold Barmettler, Switzerland.

The reported study was funded by the Russian Science Foundation according to the research project 19-72-00053.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. St. Petersburg State University, Universitetskaya nab. 7/9, 198504, St. Petersburg, Russia

    Mikhail Vokhmyanin & Nadezhda Zolotova

  2. Leibniz-Institut für Astrophysik Potsdam, An der Sternwarte 16, 14482, Potsdam, Germany

    Rainer Arlt

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  1. Mikhail Vokhmyanin
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Correspondence to Mikhail Vokhmyanin.

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Vokhmyanin, M., Arlt, R. & Zolotova, N. Sunspot Positions and Areas from Observations by Cigoli, Galilei, Cologna, Scheiner, and Colonna in 1612 – 1614. Sol Phys 296, 4 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11207-020-01752-7

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