Reconstruction of the Solar Activity from the Catalogs of the Zurich Observatory

Abstract

Catalogs of the Zurich Observatory contain positional information on sunspots, prominences, and faculae in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This database is given in handwritten tabular form and was not systematically analyzed earlier. It is different from the sunspot-number time series made in Zurich and was obtained with a larger telescope. We trained a neural-network model for handwritten text recognition and present the database of reconstructed coordinates. The database obtained connects the earlier observations by Spörer with later programs of the 20th century and supplements the sunspot-group catalogs of the Royal Greenwich Observatory. We also expect that the presented machine-learning approach and its deep capabilities will motivate the processing of a wide bulk of astronomical data, which is still given in nondigitized form or as plain scanned images.