With the NSO team moving the archive of the NSO at Sac Peak historical data to Colorado this week, one may ask the questions of "why do we need to preserve old data" and "what can be learned from it"?
Recent article by Dr. Hisashi Hayakawa and his co-authors highlights the importance of historical data for studying past solar activity. They found that the observations of solar eclipse on 13 May 1733 by Swedish astronomer and mathematician Birger Wassenius may have been the very first observations of so-called rush-to-the-poles prior to the solar polar field reversal. These Wassenius ' observations also suggest that in 1733, the Sun was not in an activity minimum as previously thought. The article was highlighted by the AAS Nova in A New Look at a Centuries-Old Solar Eclipse.
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