Secular Variations of a Shift of the Heliospheric Current Sheet

Geomagnetism and Aeronomy - The shift of the heliospheric current sheet (HCS) can be judged by the correlation between polarities of the interplanetary magnetic field (IMF) observed near the Earth....     

Sunspot Positions and Areas from Observations by Galileo Galilei

Sunspot records in the seventeenth century provide important information on the solar activity before the Maunder minimum, yielding reliable sunspot indices and the solar butterfly diagram. Galilei’s letters to Cardinal Francesco Barberini and Marcus Welser contain daily solar observations on 3?–?11 May, 2 June?–?8 July, and 19?–?21 August 1612. These historical archives do not provide the time of observation, which results in uncertainty in the sunspot coordinates. To obtain them, we present a method that minimizes the discrepancy between the sunspot latitudes. We provide areas and heliographic coordinates of 82 sunspot groups. In contrast to Sheiner’s butterfly diagram, we found only one sunspot group near the Equator. This provides a higher reliability of Galilei’s drawings. Large sunspot groups are found to emerge at the same longitude in the northern hemisphere from 3 May to 21 August, which indicates an active longitude.     

Reconstruction of the sector structure of the interplanetary magnetic field by geomagnetic station data

This paper describes a new method for reconstructing the polarity of the interplanetary magnetic field. The technique is based on the Svalgaard-Mansurov effect. We ause geomagnetic data of high-latitude stations with a long observation period, including the presatellite era. This method is designed to improve the quality and accuracy of reconstructed polarity, complementing the results of previous methods of Svalgaard (1975) and Vennerstr?m et al. (2001). For the large presatellite period from 1926, the accuracy of the method is estimated to be around 89% of overlaps with the interplanetary magnetic field polarity determined from satellite data.