MHF Journal

Issue3

Demonstration of Data Analysis using the Gnumeric

Spreadsheet Solver to Estimate the Period
for Solar Rotation
Ron Larham
Hart Plain Institute for Studies
Introduction
This paper serves two purposes, the first to show an example of data analysis and
the second to demonstrate and assess the use of the non-linear optimization function
(the solver) of of the spreadsheet application Gnumeric[1] compared to the equivalent
functionality in Excel. The data analysis task is the determination of the apparent
rotational period of the Sun from a series of photographs taken in 2004 shortly after
the last solar maximum.
The Solar Rotation and Sunspots (this section is substantially derived from the preamble to the Wikipedia article on Sun spots[3])
Sunspots are temporary phenomena on the surface of the Sun that appear as dark
spots compared to surrounding regions. They are caused by intense magnetic activity, which inhibits convection, resulting in areas of locally lower temperature. Although they are at temperatures of roughly 3,0004,500 Kelvin, the contrast with the
surrounding material at about 5,780 Kelvin leaves them clearly visible as dark spots,
as the intensity of a heated black body (closely approximated by the photosphere) is a
proportional to T 4 (where T is the temperature in Kelvin). If the sunspot were isolated
from its surroundings it would be blindingly bright. Sunspots expand and contract
as they move across the surface of the sun and can be as large as 80 106 metres in
diameter, making the larger ones visible from Earth with the naked eye (look at the
Sun directly without a suitable filter at your peril, it can be done, but can also result
in permanent burn blind spots on the retina). Spots often occur in groups (see Figure
1) which can rotate and mutate over time before disappearing. The earliest records of
sunspots are of naked eye spots and occur in Chinese records from 364 BCE. Telescopic
observation of sunspots date to 1610-11 when they were observed by Thomas Harriot,
the Fabricius brothers, Christoph Scheiner and possibly others.
Similar spots on stars are commonly called starspots and both light and dark spots
have been detected.
From early times sunspots have been used to measure the rotation rate of the Sun by in
effect timing how long it takes a spot or group of spots to cross the Sun and reappear
at the other edge. The first published measurement of the solar rotation rate was by
Christoph Scheiner [2] who also noted that the apparent rotation rate was faster at
higher solar latitudes. In what follows I will be doing this using a set of photos that I
took in 2004 and using Gnumeric do to the data reduction.
The Data
The raw data for the analysis of solar rotation period consists of a series of photos of
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Figure 1: Detail of Sunspot Group 23th July 2004 (Photo by the Author)
the Sun taken by the author between the 17th and the 23rd of July 2004. An example
of such a photo is shown in Figure 1 (not strictly an example, the figure is a 4-frame
integration of a sequence of photos taken in burst mode, the actual photos used where
single frames). The photos where printed out, the centre of the sun on the image found
and the distance of the a point midway between the two main spots in the group
shown in Figure 1 from the centre measured. This allows us, with the assumption that
the suns rotational axis is in the plane of the sky, to fit the data to a model which has
unknown rotational period, time when the group first crossed the edge of the visible
face of the Sun, and the groups solar latitude. In such a model the position of the
group on the disk of the sun may be calculated:


x
y

=R

cos(2 (t t0 )/T ) cos()

sin()

where R is the radius of the solar disk in the image, the solar latitude of the sunspot
group, t0 the time the group appeared at the edge of the visible disk, T the apparent
period of solar rotation and t the time an image was captured. From this we may
calculate the distance of the group from the centre of the image (and we dont need
to know the orientation of each image with respect to the Suns rotational axis). A
montage of the images used is shown in Figure 2.
Then the model is fitted by adjusting the parameters , t0 and T to minimize the sum
of the square error between the model prediction and the observed distance of of the
group from the centre of the Sun. The estimated standard deviation for the measurement of the radial distance of the group from the centre of the solar image is about 2
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Figure 2: Montage of Photos of the Sun Taken (bottom right to top left) on the 17th, 20th, 21st, 23rd
and 24th of July 2004 (rotated into approximately the same orientation).
mm. (Note technically the period T was not used as a parameter rather the angular
velocity = 2/T was used)
The Spreadsheet Model
The Gnumeric spreadsheet implementing the model is shown in Figure 3. The main
dialogs to set up the solver are shown in Figures 4,5 and 6
Results
The result of the fitting process can be seen in Figure 3. The least squares estimate for
the solar rotation period is 27.3 days.
This is a point estimate and gives us no indication of the uncertainty in our estimate. It
is not obvious how to calculate the error associated with our estimation process, so we
revert to a Monte-Carlo technique. Assume that the solution found by the least squares
procedure is close to the true solution, generate the distance from the edge of the Sun
data corresponding to the times of the actual observations and then add in normally
distributed errors with zero mean and SD equal to the estimated measurement SD in
the real data. Use this simulated data to fit the rotation model and record the rotational
period that is found. Repeat to generated a sample of rotational periods.
Doing this I generated a sample of 11 rotational periods with mean 27.46 days and
standard deviation 1.15 days. From this we conclude that there is no significant evidence of bias in an estimate of rotational period generated the by the method we have
used (the sample mean is only sightly more than 1 SD from the true rotational period
in the Monte-Carlo experiment), and that for data similar to ours we expect a SD of
~1.2 days for our estimate of rotational period.
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Figure 3: Gnumeric Spreadsheet with the data in the first three columns near
the top and the model parameters on the left near the bottom (all distances in cm, times in hours)

Figure 4: Solver dialog to set the cell with the objective to minimize, and the cells that
contain the parameters to be changed to find the minimum

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Figure 5: Dialog showing the solver method set to non-linear

Figure 6: Dialog box showing constraints being set

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So our result is that we find the apparent rotational period of the Sun to be 27.3 days
with a SD on this estimate of ~1.2 days. This is for a Sun spot group at a very low
solar latitude (the solar period is latitude dependent increasing with latitude). This
compares with the usually accepted value of 26.24 days for the equatorial rotational
period of the Sun.
Assessment of the Gnumeric Solver
It is clear that Gnumeric and its solver performed satisfactorily for the task set it in this
note. However several bugs made themselves apparent in the process:
Constraints were not always observed
The cell reference for the objective had the currently selected cell reference prepended
every time that the solver dialog was called up
A constraint with a numeric right hand side did not have the numeric value
saved with the sheet
In addition there was no documentation that I could find that specified the optimization method that the solver implemented.
All three of the bugs I believe are in the known bugs data base on the Gnumeric site,
and the second and possibly the third have been solved in the most recent release of
Gnumeric. I expect that the documentation of the optimization algorithm will eventually be corrected, there is a work around which involves examining the source code
but this is not entirely satisfactory.
Compared to Excel the Gnumeric solver found a smaller minimum for the objective,
but this did not result in a substantially different estimate of the rotational period.
It is a limitation of spread sheets in general that without further automation (which
is in principle possible) the number of Monte-Carlo replications achievable by hand
cranking the model is limited by the patience of the analyst (in this case to 11 replications). If a larger number of replications are needed it would be better to use a system
designed for such purposes such as the numerical packages like Matlab, Euler, Octave,
etc. However the learning curves for such tools are relatively steep for these tools and
so the use of spreadsheets for teaching data analysis can be useful.

References
[1] Gnumeric Project: http://projects.gnome.org/gnumeric/
[2] Christoph Scheiner Rosa Ursine sive solis, book 4, part 2, 1630
[3] Wikipedia, Sunspot, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunspot [accessed 9th August
2010]
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