[Astronomy] The numbers, what do they mean?

[u/Amidseas]

I'm doing a personal science project called Sunspot cycles from the website science buddy. Basically I use data from an observatory to make a spreadsheet and use formulas on it on excel. I understood all the steps of extracting and importing from the observatory website but I'm stuck on what the rest of the rows after ( year, month, day ) stand for. I can take care of the rest

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[u/Amidseas]

this is the website for reference

[u/Amidseas → u/Amidseas]

the observatory data

[u/notfunat_parties → u/Amidseas]

The data description is in the green "info" box next to where you downloaded your data.

[u/Amidseas → u/notfunat_parties]

Oh thank you I missed it

[u/AtmosphereEven3526 → u/Amidseas]

Click the More Info button on this page. It is explained there under the contents of each file depending on which file you downloaded.

Looking at your data it looks like you downloadedthe Daily total file.

Contents: year, month, day, decimal year, SNvalue , SNerror, Nb observations

[u/RufflesTGP]

There must be info on how the files store data on that website, I'd suggest you have a look there

[u/Amidseas → u/RufflesTGP]

I did, the website doesn't provide an explanation unfortunately

[u/RufflesTGP → u/Amidseas]

I can see a green info button next to the file download

[u/FortuitousPost]

It looks like column 7 is missing in the data you are showing (number of observations)

August 18, 1818 is 0.629 through the year, or 1818.629 in years. The mean number of sunspots from the stations is 53 with standard deviation of 9.3 sunspots. This is a definite observation.

The negative numbers indicate missing data for those days. Note that these are provisional data.

Filename: SN_d_tot_V2.0.txt
Format: plain ASCII text

Contents:
Column 1-3: Gregorian calendar date

• Year
  
• Month
  
• Day
  

Column 4: Date in fraction of year
Column 5: Daily total sunspot number. A value of -1 indicates that no number is available for that day (missing value).
Column 6: Daily standard deviation of the input sunspot numbers from individual stations.
Column 7: Number of observations used to compute the daily value.
Column 8: Definitive/provisional indicator. A blank indicates that the value is definitive. A '*' symbol indicates that the value is still provisional and is subject to a possible revision (Usually the last 3 to 6 months)

Line format [character position]:

• [1-4] Year
  
• [6-7] Month
  
• [9-10] Day
  
• [12-19] Decimal date
  
• [22-24] Daily sunspot number
  
• [26-30] Standard deviation
  
• [33-35] Number of observations
  
• [37] Definitive/provisional indicator

[u/arrgobon32]

You’re the one that knows the source data. How are we supposed to know?