First Results from Sunspotter

Hello Sunspotters,

After our brief hiatus, we are about to launch the next phase Sunspotter this Friday! As we mentioned before, there will be >200,000 images. Ranking the sunspot group complexity of this new dataset will require literally millions of clicks. This time we are trying to learn about the evolution of complexity in sunspot groups.

Last time, our goal was to obtain a quantitative measure of sunspot group complexity- the results of this are exactly what I presented to the attendees of the 224th American Astrophysical Society meeting in Boston, MA, last week. My talk was well attended by sunspot and solar flare experts who asked a number of insightful questions about the data analysis method, and about how data was presented to the hard-working volunteers.

You can view the slides from the presentation on FigShare. I will be writing an in-depth post explaining the methods and analysis techniques used to get these results as we pull the journal paper together for publication.

Hope to see you all on Talk.Sunspotter.org soon!