Illustration of Sunspot cycle

1843 Sunspot cycle

The book of science

Tom Sharp

Heinrich Schwabe astronomy Illustration of Sunspot cycle

Sunspot cycle

After patiently counting the sunspots every day for seventeen slow years with his five-centi- meter telescope, Heinrich Samuel Schwabe, apothecary, announced that sunspots waxed and waned in a cycle of ten years.

Patterns in the sky

They say patterns in the sky govern our lives. If we tell you to do what you are doing then will you not seem to obey?

Spots

As if a blemish had appeared on the Flemish virgin the virgin Mary has spots on her sinless soul so we suffer loss of faith even cognitive dissonance even though there gradually emerges a measure of sense to it all unable to sympathize with those who cooly examine the sores of whores.

Because Heinrich Schwabe was an apothecary, he had to work during the day, so he could not stay up all night to study the stars. Studying the sun was his recourse. Originally, he thought that a dark spot on the sun might be a sign of the passing of the planet that Urbain Le Verrier had proposed orbited the sun inside the orbit of Mercury.

The solar cycle is now known to be about 11 years on average, but varying between 9 and 14 years. Nevertheless, the cycle is associated with changes in solar radiation, solar flares, and coronal mass ejections, whoses effects are felt on the earth, so this was an important discovery. Alexander von Humboldt used Schwabe’s observations in the third volume of Kosmos in 1851.

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