Galileo’s sunspot sketches get AI-enhanced makeover

A long effort finally paying off

The work is “very interesting,” says Roger Ulrich, the director of Mount Wilson’s the 150 foot solar tower. “Their first step is obviously to demonstrate that the method basically works — and they did that. So it would be interesting to see how far they can carry it.”

For Ulrich, this work is the start of something he has long hoped would come from he and his staff’s efforts to maintain and digitize the sunspot sketch archive. “The idea of going back and kind of resurrecting old global magnetogram structures for the Sun has always intrigued me as something that would be valuable,” he says. “The sunspot drawings have some of that information, but obviously not enough of it without this other AI approach.”

One limitation of the model, however, is that it doesn’t reproduce non-active regions of the Sun with weak magnetic fields, which Ulrich says would be necessary to get a comprehensive picture of the Sun’s magnetic field at any given moment, past or present. Though he admits it might not be possible to solve, he adds “it certainly would be worth checking out.”

Unfortunately, Ulrich and his team were forced to cease their research operations at the 150-foot solar tower back in 2012 due to equipment failures and a lack of funding. But a volunteer observer, Steve Padilla, still climbs the tower every clear day to make a sunspot sketch, which is posted online each day. But Ulrich says it’s gratifying to see the digitized data — which go back to 1967 and took about three years to process — be useful.

“That’s part of why I wanted to get the drawings out there to people,” says Ulrich. “I am glad that the availability of the data has helped the community like this.”