Where to Find Sunspot Records

It can be very useful to astrologers (and others) to look back at the level of sunspot activity about the time one was born. Sunspots were known to Hindu astrologers by 505 AD, so the use of sunspots has quite a long tradition behind it. And more recently, the dramatic swings in something as mundane as the population of snowshoe hares has been proven to be linked to the roughly 11-year sunspot cycle. Times of unusually active solar flares can knock out communications and destroy large power transformers (as it did back in 1989).

Right now we are in a cycle of increasing solar flare activity. This is NOT good news for professionals in the psychiatric business, because a four-year-long study showed a rise in admissions to two New York mental institutions correlated to increased geomagnetic activity.

For an excellent website reference, go to http://sidc.oma.be/html/sunspot.html for something titled: “Record of Sunspot Activity — Daily, from 1849-2002”. Catchy, isn’t it?
You might also enjoy reading an article on the subject on a British website called Astro-sphere at http://www.astro-sphere.co.uk/Sunspots.htm.