books Great Moments in the History of Solar Physics books

1223 BC The oldest eclipse record

ca. 800 BC The first plausible recorded sunspot observation

        aristotle ca. 350 BC Sun circling under a sheltering sky

    ca. 250 BC The distance to the Sun     968 The first mention of the solar corona

    1128 The first sunspot drawing     1185 The first description of solar prominences

1543 The Sun moves to center stage


kepler 1609 The Sun in focus

1610 First telescopic observations of sunspots

1630 The Sun's rotation axis

1644 The Sun as a star descartes


E.W. Maunder 1645-1715 Sunspots vanish


1666 The colors of sunlight newton 1687 The mass of the Sun


herschel 1774-1801 The physical nature of sunspots


1796 The nebular hypothesis laplace


1800 The Sun's invisible radiation


wollaston 1802 Black lines in the Sun


1817 Solar spectroscopy is born fraunhofer


jherschel 1838 The solar constant


1843 The sunspot cycle schwabe


1845 The first solar photograph


wolf 1848 The sunspot number


1852 The sunspot cycle is linked to geomagnetic activity Sabine


Spoerer 1858-1859 The solar differential rotation


1859 First observation of a solar flare


1859 The chemical composition of the Sun kirchhoff


1860 First observations of a coronal mass ejection


stewart 1865 The first solar cycle model


1868 Discovery of Helium [Under construction] lockyer


young 1869 The coronal green line


1870 The internal structure of the Sun


1877 Solar granulation [Under construction] janssen


langley 1881 The solar constant, again


1894 The effective temperature of the Sun [Under construction]


1899 The Sun and the aurora birkeland


1904 The butterfly diagram A. Maunder


schwarzschild 1906 The structure of the solar atmosphere


1908 The magnetic nature of sunspots hale


1909 The Evershed effect [Under construction]


1919 The Sun's magnetic cycle


langley 1926 The internal structure of the Sun, again


1929 A Hydrogen Sun [Under construction] russell


lyot 1931 The coronagraph


1938 The p-p chain [Under construction] bethe


edlen 1941 The million-degree solar corona


1942 Solar radio emission reber


1946 Solar Physics in space [Under construction]


biermann 1951 An outflow from the Sun? [Under construction]


1953 The magnetograph [Under construction] hwbabcock


1958 The solar wind [Under construction]


To search the history database for a particular solar physicist click here.

books Suggested further readings on the history of solar physics

-Written by Paul Charbonneau.
-Last revised by paulchar@astro.umontreal.ca on 8 January 2008.