Records of Auroras in Arabic Historical Sources: Additional List and Preliminary Analysis

Abstract

Few studies have collected and analyzed the astronomical events recorded in Arabic literature. In this paper, we present some additional events reported in four Arabic historical sources that could be classified as an aurora. These observations occurred from 9th to 20th century and cover a large geographic area: North Africa, Arabian-Peninsula and Middle-East. Some of them were observed at very low geomagnetic latitude, such as the event seen in Yemen in AD 1919 that can be considered as one of the lowest latitude auroras ever documented by Arabic scholars. In the same Yemenite source, the author describes a twilight phenomenon of 1883 October 03–November 01 which can be considered as an atmospheric-optical phenomenon arising from the major explosive eruptions of Krakatoa in 1883 August 26–27. We also noticed that one of the events which was seen for 7 days coincide probably with the prolonged manifestation of auroras of 1870 September 24–25. Including published records, we compiled a so far most complete catalog of potential auroral candidates in the Arabic sources. This data set can be used in order to study the solar activity variations and magnetic storms in the historical past. One of the interesting auroras was seen in Mecca ($\sim17^{\circ}$ MLAT) in 1872 February 04. This event is further evidence for the equatorward extension of auroral display and the planetary consequences of the great geomagnetic storm of 1872. Finally, it should be underlined that no aurora observations were recorded during the Maunder minimum (MM).