Reconstructed sunspot positions in the Maunder Minimum based on the correspondence of Gottfried Kirch

TL;DR

This study reconstructs sunspot positions during the Maunder Minimum using historical letters, providing new data on sunspot groups, spotless days, and heliographic latitudes, and revises existing sunspot catalogs and butterfly diagrams.

Contribution

It introduces a novel reconstruction of sunspot positions from 1680-1709 based on Kirch's correspondence, including new sunspot groups and spotless days, and corrects historical catalog discrepancies.

Findings

Identified 35 sunspot groups from Kirch's letters.

Discovered 17 previously unknown spotless days.

Amended the Maunder Minimum butterfly diagram.

Abstract

We present reconstructed sunspot positions based on observations reported in letters between Gottfried Kirch and other contemporary astronomers from AD 1680 to 1709, i.e. in the last decades of the Maunder Minimum. The letters were compiled and edited by Herbst (2006). The letters (and observations) from Kirch are mostly by Gottfried Kirch, but some also by his 2nd wife Maria M. Kirch (married 1692) and their son Christfried Kirch (born 1694). Using excerpts from the letters, some with drawings, we found some 35 sunspot groups (often for several days in a row or with interruptions) by Kirch and/or his letter partners (in three cases, only the month is given: 1704 Jan, Feb, 1707 Mar, otherwise always the exact dates) - usually one group at a time. We also found 17 explicit spotless days, several of them new (previously without any known observations). We could constrain the heliographic latitude by Bayesian inference for 19 sunspot groups - five of them completely new (one group 1680 May 20-22 from Kirch and Ihle, one to two groups 1680 Jun 15-23 for Kirch, one group 1684 May 6 from Ihle, and one group 1688 Dec 14-15 from Kirch), while the others mostly agree (within 2sigma) with previously published values for those dates by others. With these data, we then amend the butterfly diagram for the Maunder Minimum. By comparison of our data with the sunspot group catalog in Hoyt & Schatten (1998), we noticed a number of discrepancies, e.g. that dates for British observers in the Maunder Minimum (Flamsteed, Caswell, Derham, Stannyan, Gray, and Sharp) as listed in Hoyt & Schatten (1998) are their original Julian dates, not converted to the Gregorian calendar (10-11 day offset in Hoyt & Schatten). Most of these modifications also apply to the modified sunspot group catalog in Vaquero et al. (2016). We also present two aurorae observed by the Kirchs in 1707 and 1716.