Solar Observations
Part of Maunder's job at the Observatory involved photographing and measuring sunspots, and in doing so he observed that the solar latitudes at which sunspots occur varies in a regular way over the course of the 11 year cycle. After 1891, he was assisted in his work by his second wife, Annie Scott Dill Maunder (née Russell), a mathematician educated at Girton College in Cambridge. She worked as a "lady computer" at the Observatory from 1890 to 1895. In 1904, he published their results in the form of the "butterfly" diagram.
After studying the work of Gustav Spörer, who examined old records from the different observatories archives looking for changes of the heliographic latitude of sunspots, Maunder announced Spörer's conclusions in own paper edited in 1894. The period, recognized earlier by Spörer, now bears Maunder name.
Read more about this topic: Edward Walter Maunder
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