3-3
Online sunspot image data
You may have noticed that the sunspotter can only take data on sunny days! Since this is
New England, these are often few and far between. As a back-up option, you can also
view recent pictures of the sun online and count the number of sunspots you see. To do
this, go to the following website:
http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/data/realtime/realtime-mdi_igr-256.html
Go down to the BOTTOM HALF of the page, where you will see the words “List of
Individual Images.” A list of links follows. The links are titled in the form year-monthday-time. For example, the link: 20030714_0238 represents a picture from 2003, July
14th at 2:38. We won’t worry about the time, though…just the date.
Record your observations in the chart below. In activity 3-4, you will graph this data
along with the sunspotter data.
Date
Number of sunspots