Sunspot latitudes during the Maunder Minimum: a machine-readable catalogue from previous studies

Abstract

The Maunder Minimum (1645-1715 approximately) was a period of very low solar activity and a strong hemispheric asymmetry, with most of sunspots in the southern hemisphere. In this paper, two data sets of sunspot latitudes during the Maunder minimum have been recovered for the international scientific community. The first data set is constituted by latitudes of sunspots appearing in the catalogue published by Gustav Spörer nearly 130 years ago. The second data set is based on the sunspot latitudes displayed in the butterfly diagram for the Maunder Minimum which was published by Ribes and Nesme-Ribes almost 20 years ago. We have calculated the asymmetry index using these data sets confirming a strong hemispherical asymmetry in this period. A machine-readable version of this catalogue with both data sets is available in the Historical Archive of Sunspot Observations (http://haso.unex.es) and in the appendix of this article.

14 pages, 1 figure, accepted for publication in "Advances in Space Research"

References in corpus (2)

• Historical Sunspot Observations: A Review
• The butterfly diagram in the 18th century

Cited by in corpus (7)

• Visualization of the challenges and limitations of the long-term sunspot number record
• Level and length of cyclic solar activity during the Maunder minimum as deduced from the active day statistics
• North-south asymmetry in Rieger-type periodicity during solar cycles 19-23
• Sunspot characteristics at the onset of the Maunder Minimum based on the observations of Hevelius
• Reanalyses of the Sunspot Observations of Fogelius and Siverus: Two "Long-Term" Observers during the Maunder Minimum
• Sunspot observations by Charles Malapert during the period 1618-1626: a key dataset to understand solar activity before the Maunder minimum
• Latitude and power characteristics of solar activity in the end of the Maunder minimum