Abstract
We revisit the sunspot drawings made by the Japanese astronomer Kunitomo Toubei during 1835 – 1836 and recount the sunspot group number for each image. There are two series of drawings, preliminary (\(P\), containing 17 days with observations) and summary (\(S\), covering 156 days with observations), all made using brush and ink. \(S\) is a compilation of drawings for the period from February 1835, to March 1836. Presently, the \(P\) drawings are available only for one month, September 1835; those of other periods have presumably been lost. Another drawing (\(I\)) lets us recover the raw group count (RGC) for 25 September 1836, on which the RGC has not been registered in the existing catalogs. We also revise the RGCs from \(P\) and \(S\) using the Zürich classification and determine that Kunitomo’s results tend to yield smaller RGCs than those of other contemporary observers. In addition, we find that Kunitomo’s RGCs and spot areas have a correlation (0.71) that is not very different from the contemporary observer Schwabe (0.82). Although Kunitomo’s spot areas are much larger than those determined by Schwabe due to skill and instrument limitations, Kunitomo at least captured the growing trend of the spot activity in the early phase of Solar Cycle 8. We also determine the solar rotation axis to estimate the accurate position (latitude and longitude) of the sunspot groups in Kunitomo’s drawings.
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Notes
Millionths of Solar Hemisphere: The unit of sunspot area generally used when the size of sunspots is mentioned.
Note that Kunitomo actually provides disks for 157 days, but one of them is without observational record due to rain (3 March 1835).
From 1 January 1835 to 31 December 1836, Schwabe observed during 422 days, whereas Kunitomo did so during 156 days. Stark, Hussey, Tevel, Bohm and Herschel performed observations for 147, 112, 25, 20, and 1 days, respectively. See Vaquero et al. (2016) for the number of days with observations for other sunspot observers.
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Acknowledgements
We thank Masanobu Kunitomo for providing permission to use the figure and data for Kunitomo’s observation, and the Nagahama City Museum for letting us see the microfilm, Kosuke Fukuda and Tadateru Sugawa for access to the microfilm, R. Uemura and Y. Kobayashi for help in preparing analyses of sunspot area, Y. Mizuno for technical supports for a trace copy, M. Morishita and M. Woods for a grammatical review, Yoshihito Sakai for his advice on Kunitomo’s telescope, and E. W. Cliver for scientific comments and a preliminary review of our study. This work was supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Numbers JP16K17671 and JP15H05814. This work is partially supported by MEXT/JSPS KAKENHI Grant Number 15H05816.
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Fujiyama, M., Hayakawa, H., Iju, T. et al. Revisiting Kunitomo’s Sunspot Drawings During 1835 – 1836 in Japan. Sol Phys 294, 43 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11207-019-1429-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11207-019-1429-3