The Maunder Minimum (1645-1715 approximately) was a period of very low solar activity and a strong hemispheric asymmetry, with most of sunspots in the southern hemisphere. In this paper, two data sets of sunspot latitudes during the Maunder minimum have been recovered for the international scientific community. The first data set is constituted by latitudes of sunspots appearing in the catalogue published by Gustav Spörer nearly 130 years ago. The second data set is based on the sunspot latitudes displayed in the butterfly diagram for the Maunder Minimum which was published by Ribes and Nesme-Ribes almost 20 years ago. We have calculated the asymmetry index using these data sets confirming a strong hemispherical asymmetry in this period. A machine-readable version of this catalogue with both data sets is available in the Historical Archive of Sunspot Observations (http://haso.unex.es) and in the appendix of this article.
Angelo Secchi (1818-1878) was an Italian Jesuit who made relevant scientific contributions in the area of geophysics, meteorology and astrophysics. He was a well-known pioneer in solar physics due to his theories and observations. Secchi published in his book Le Soleil (The Sun) a summary of knowledge about our star in that time. Moreover, he published in this book his sunspot and prominence observations made during the period 1871–1875. In this work, we present a machine-readable version of these observations as well as a preliminary analysis of them.
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