[nmcveity]

I visited Mt Wilson on the weekend and took the tour there. One part of the tour took us inside the 150ft solar tower operated by UCLA. I was surprised to see that they recorded sunspot activity by sketching diagrams by hand.

And they put them on the web. If you want to see "puzzling" lack of sunspot activity, here it is:

http://obs.astro.ucla.edu/cur_drw.html

[anigbrowl]

I hope this is some masochistic exercise forced on young astronomers to make them appreciate what their forbears had to do before they're let loose on the computers.

I'm also puzzled as to why the date is logged as 11 December, since it's the 11th of November.

[_delirium]

It looks like they've been doing it this way since 1917: ftp://howard.astro.ucla.edu/pub/obs/drawings/

Some information on the process: http://obs.astro.ucla.edu/150_draw.html

That doesn't in itself explain why they wouldn't be generating these diagrams automatically nowadays. Perhaps nobody's written a sunspot-finding computer vision algorithm that consistently produces the results they want, in a format vaguely compatible with the traditional drawings?

[GFischer]

Edit: I found this interesting piece which details how Steve Padilla has been doing the drawings for 40 years!

http://www.latimes.com/local/columnone/la-me-c1-mt-wilson-su...

He says: he likes the tradition, this convergence of science and art.

"The value," he says, "is not so much in the individual achievement but in maintaining the daily record."

However, the telescope's annual budget of $250,000, cobbled together with grants from NASA and the National Science Foundation, runs out in the spring, and Ulrich says odds of getting more money from NASA are long.

Edit - previous speculation I wrote: Hmmm.. maybe Steve Padilla wrote it as 12-11-2013 (like we write it in South America) instead of 11-12-2013 like in the U.S. ?

[anigbrowl]

I said '11 Dec 2013' so I don't think it's euro/US date format confusion (and I'm Euro myself, so I wholeheartedly approve of putting the mday before the month like every other sane person).

[anigbrowl]

s/I/It