Galileo: Sunspot Movie

Albert Van Helden, a distinguished historian of science at Rice University, shows several different animations of Galileo's sunspot data at http://es.rice.edu/ES/humsoc/Galileo/Things/g_sunspots.html That website (by Albert Van Helden and Elizabeth Burr) on Galileo is superb, a model for a teaching and research site. It presents a great amount of material about Galileo and about science in the 17th century. http://es.rice.edu/ES/humsoc/Galileo/ My students in evidence design at Yale over the years have also made sunspot movies, scanning the original engravings from Galileo's Istoria e dimostrazioni intorno alle macchie solari (Rome, 1613). I show one of those student movies in my one-day course.

-- Edward Tufte, July 25, 2001

Response to ET Course. Galileo's Sunspot illustrations

A good, modern-day sunspot movie, which shows a recent exciting sunspot, is posted at today's

http://spaceweather.com/

or for a direct link to the movie only

http://spaceweather.com/images2005/13jan05/720_big.gif

a link which will need updating as the day-to-day motion is tracked.

-- Edward Tufte, January 13, 2005

In following some of the links above, I ran across the following site. The link below will take you to a page with links to images by Muybridge and Marey. See also the root directory for anatomical drawings by Vesalius, Da Vinci and others. http://www.fdcw.unimaas.nl/blok32v/thema2.htm I hope you find this useful. Peter

-- Peter Vint (email), February 8, 2005

The modern sunspot movies are from the NASA/ESA Solar & Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO). Near real-time images from the Michelson Doppler Imager (MDI) and other instruments are located here:

http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/data/realtime-images.html

-- Robert Simmon (email), February 8, 2005

i can't help but contribute this stunning animation of the sun in rotation over a six day span. having just participated in tufte's course in new york, compared to galileo's sunspot movie, this animated gif is particularly interesting. http://cache.boston.com/universal/site_graphics/blogs/bigpicture/sol_10_13/sol09.gif

other stunning photos of the sun, including close up images of actual sunspots, can be found back here on the Big Picture blog: http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2008/10/the_sun.html

enjoy!

-- ian addison hall (email), October 20, 2008

Dear ET

400 years after Galileo's sunspot explorations - the first high-resolution images of the Sun have been returned from NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), which was launched in February.

http://tinyurl.com/29q5589

Beautiful and unseen till now.

Matt

A filament at a wavelength of 304 angstroms

-- Matt R (email), April 23, 2010