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Research
This project is all about looking at drawings of the Sun that were made more than 100 years ago and extracting the number of sunspots they include. In particular, we will consult solar observations made by Angelo Secchi at Collegio Romano, in Rome Italy from 1853 to 1878.
Angelo Secchi was a Jesuit and a dedicated scientist who was really interested in the Sun and its secrets.
From 1853 to 1878, he undertook the fascinating task of observing the Sun every day that weather allowed him.
In this process he made many drawings of dark spots that he saw on the Sun's surface, called sunspots.
The main task of this project is to extract the number of sunspots in each of Secchi's drawings.
That is a very important task because such drawings of the Sun are like time capsules. The number of sunspots included in each drawing tells us about how magnetically active the Sun was in the day the observation was performed! Therefore, identifying and counting the sunspots in these old drawings helps us learn more about how the Sun behaved a long time ago, but also helps us understand how the Sun's activity can change over time. The data that will be derived from this project will be used in future studies of the international sunspot number, which is one of the most commonly used measures of solar activity over time.
But there's more to it! This project can also help us understand how the Sun affects our planet. That is because such drawings of sunspots can help us figure out how bright the Sun was in the past, and consequently how much radiative energy it sent to Earth. Therefore, by looking at these drawings and learning about the Sun's brightness in the past, we can understand better how the Sun can affect the Earth's climate.
The drawings in this project belong to Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica (INAF) and they are stored at Osservatorio Astronomico di Roma (OAR).
The images used in this project were produced by singling out individual sunspot groups based on the work carried out in Ermolli et al. (2023).
Portrait of Angelo Secchi
(Taken from Vatican observatory website)
Cartoon of Angelo Secchi from the youtube videos The QuEST
(credit: European Solar Telescope project)
An example drawing of sunspot by Secchi
(credit: INAF)
