Mt. Wilson Solar Photographic Archive Digitization Project

University Of California-Los Angeles, Los Angeles CA

Investigators

Abstract

The Mt. Wilson Solar Photographic Digitization Project will make available to the community in digital form a selection of solar images in the archives of the Carnegie Observatories. These images date from 1894 and include many which can be judged to be of superb quality by modern standards. The digitization will use commercial scanning technology with a prepress scanner having 16-bit precision and up to 3000 by 3000 dots per inch spatial resolution. These images will permit a variety of retrospective analyses of the state of solar magnetism and activity, and they will provide a temporal baseline of 100 years for numerous solar attributes. The 20th Century was a period of increased anthropogenic production of greenhouse gases, which may contribute to global climate change. The sun could also be a factor in global climate change. The data provided by this digitization will allow the scientific community to freely examine the secular variation of the sun's magnetic behavior during this same time frame, and may thus be crucial in disentangling the solar and anthropogenic effects.