I am looking for your daily raw sunspot counts for AAVSO observers from before the year 2000. I am hoping that several of you active AAVSO sunspot counters will still have your original raw daily data back in your old logbooks or records, and that you can pass them along. This is a data-rescue or data-recovery operation.
The goal is to recover as much as possible of the full AAVSO raw sunspot data base, with the aim of putting out a data paper in ApJ, which contains an on-line-only full data table (with ~half-a-million observations) of every recovered daily measure. I want to include every observation for every AAVSO observer for every day. The minimum for each day would be YEAR, MONTH, DAY, OBSERVER, the observed G (group count), the observed S (spot count), and the observed Wolf number (10G+S). This must be only for observers who have contributed their data to the AAVSO, back in the day. I am only looking for the raw daily counts for before the year 2000.
The problem is that much of the raw-daily-data from roughly 1976 to 1999 has been lost. We have the processed data over the entire AAVSO record from 1944 to 2024, but we are ambitiously trying to reprocess the original observed data, and for this we need the original raw sunspot counts. We have a complete record of raw data from 2000 to present. And I have rescued the data from 1945 to around 1976 (with some months missing), from a complete photocopy of the AAVSO Headquarters records that I made in 1995. And we have recovered a variety of special case observations collected for various individual observer based on their original logbooks. But this leaves us with big gaps, mostly 1976–1999.
Many of you long-term AAVSO observers might have your own personal archival records of your data going back to before the year 2000. You might have it as old data scattered in your logbooks, or you might have it in copies of your original monthly report sheets. Or you might have put your old data into some electronic summary listing. I’ll take whatever you conveniently have. Even if you do not have such, maybe you know someone who might have the needed data, and if so then please pass along my plea.
My heartfelt plea is for you to send along to me your pre-2000 daily raw data. The preferred format would be electronic and in EXCEL. But any format is fine, from handwritten lists, up to photocopies of logbooks or monthly reoprt sheets, up to any spreadsheet listing. Please use my private email address ( bradschaefer@mac.com ), as my LSU email makes occasional stupidities of returning or dropping emails from non-academic addresses. Or you can postal-mail it to <Brad Schaefer, 1434 E. Seneca St., Tucson AZ 85719 USA>.
The goal here is to rescue as much old AAVSO data as possible.
Cheers,
Brad
Bradley E. Schaefer
Professor, Department of Physics and Astronomy
Louisiana State University
Baton Rouge, Louisiana 70803, USA
email to bradschaefer@mac.com [schaefer@lsu.edu]