18 August 2011

I was back on the Raben Systems web page today looking to see of NOAA had found the small, central disk sunspot yet (it appears they have) and landed on a page with some interesting data on it. Along with the map of the spots he includes a table summarizing each group's characteristics. He references a Zurich System for describing group characteristics. When I researched it I landed on a page of the Solar Influenced Data Analysis Center (SIDC) in Belgium. I learned that the Zurich System is the first element of the McIntosh classification which I have been using.

Backing up the date on the Raben page I pulled up the data from yesterday and found that my estimates of the group positions and their characteristics bore some resemblance to those he listed. I also realized that in my record of the individual groups I have omitted the number of spots in the group and have only provided an aggregate count of the spots by hemisphere in the table above the group descriptions. This omission I have rectified as of yesterday's entry.

I also noticed today that some of my reference links to prior blog posts along the right side of the page no longer work. Worse, the pages they reference seem to have been somehow deleted from the blog. I am going to have to go through all the links to see which ones work and which don't. I am afraid there is no way to recover the data from the missing observing sessions.