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A Modern Reconstruction of Richard Carrington’s Observations (1853–1861)

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Abstract

The focus of this article is a re-count of Richard Carrington’s original sunspot observations from his book drawings (Carrington in Observations of the Spots on the Sun from November 9, 1853, to March 24, 1861 Made at Redhill, Williams and Norgate, London, 1863) by an observer from the World Data Center-SILSO (WDC-SILSO, http://www.sidc.be/silso/home) network, Thomas H. Teague (UK). This modern re-count will enable the recomputation of the entire Sunspot Number series in a way Carrington’s original counts (Casas and Vaquero in Solar Phys. 289(1), 79, 2014) did not. Here we present comparison studies of the new re-counted series with contemporary observations, new data extracted from the Journals of the Zürich Observatory and other sources of Carrington’s own observations and conclude that Carrington’s group counting is very close to the modern way of counting while his method for counting individual spots lags significantly behind modern counts. We also test the quality and robustness of the new recount with methods developed in Mathieu et al. (Astrophys. J. 886(1), 7, 2019).

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by a PhD grant awarded by the Royal Observatory of Belgium to S. Bhattacharya. L. Lefèvre and F. Clette wish to acknowledge the support of ISSI https://www.issibern.ch/teams/sunspotnoser/. The authors would also like to thank the referee for his/her constructive comments that helped to improve this manuscript considerably.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. WDC-SILSO, Royal Observatory of Belgium, Brussels, Belgium

    S. Bhattacharya, S. Fay, L. Lefèvre & F. Clette

  2. WDC-SILSO observer, Chester, UK

    E. T. H. Teague

  3. McGill University, Montreal, Canada

    S. Fay

  4. Université Libre de Bruxelles, Brussels, Belgium

    S. Bhattacharya & M. Jansen

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  1. S. Bhattacharya
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  2. E. T. H. Teague
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  3. S. Fay
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  4. L. Lefèvre
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  6. F. Clette
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Correspondence to S. Bhattacharya.

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Bhattacharya, S., Teague, E.T.H., Fay, S. et al. A Modern Reconstruction of Richard Carrington’s Observations (1853–1861). Sol Phys 296, 118 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11207-021-01864-8

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