“No Sun Spots Visible”
―John Edwards, 1913.
In February 1907 John Edwards, assistant to astronomy professor Winslow Upton, recorded a drawing of spots that he observed on the Sun. Due to the brightness of the Sun it is not safe to look at it through a telescope. Instead he used a method called eyepiece projection which forms an image on a sheet of circular graph paper. The outline of the spots can then be accurately traced with a pencil. The sketch shows a complex arrangement of sunspots during a month when the Sun was very active. This was shortly after the peak of the Sun’s 11 year cycle of increasing and then decreasing activity. Sunspots appear in active regions where there are strong and complex magnetic fields.
By 1913 the Sun’s cycle had reached the minimum of the cycle and no spots were visible during some months that year. It is important to note the lack of sunspot activity so that someone examining the preserved records a century later knows that the astronomer looked and didn’t find any. Otherwise it might be thought that the data was merely missing. Notice that on Jul 18, 1913 there is a note that it was cloudy that day.
Continue reading “No Sun Spots Visible”