Sunspots

Different layers of the sun are at different temperatures, but the sun radiates heat much like a body at 10,000° F. … If it is heavily cloudy, very little of the sun's radiation reaches the earth.

A 1975 Zomeworks Corporation book by Steve Baer (the dome/zome and solar-energy pioneer, author of Dome Cookbook and Zome Primer), illustrated by the Criss-Cross Art Workshop and dedicated to Theodore Baird. Though catalogued here within the broader Fuller/buckyverse corpus — Baer's zome geometry and the appropriate-technology counterculture grew out of the same geodesic milieu — Sunspots is Baer's own work, not Fuller's. It blends "collected facts and solar fiction": plain physics explained through homely models, interleaved with practical solar hardware.

Structure

Eleven chapters move from celestial geometry to buildable solar technology:

The Sun — solar radiation, the earth's elliptical orbit, the 23½° axial tilt and the seasons, shadows, and "The Sun Riots" (sunspots). Includes the signature sections "The Earth Is an Orange and the Sun Is a Grapefruit," "Morning Front Windshield — Evening Back Windshield," "Autumn on Uranus," and "A Shadow Gives the Date."
Energy — energy in a car crash, energy units, dams/hydroelectric stations, "A 50 Watt Dog," "Portrait of a Gasoline Drinker," "How Much Is One Man Worth?", sunlight, and mechanical equivalents of solar energy.
Basic Technology — science and technology.
Bubbles, Water, Heat Pipes — bubble machines, bubble solar collectors, refractive indices, a stock-pond melter, a new kind of heat pipe.
Heat Exchangers.
Heat Collectors and Houses.
Flat Plate Collectors.
Air Loop Rock Storage Systems.
Engines.
Skylids — Baer's insulating louver invention.
Solar Energy Conferences.

Core ideas

Solar geometry made tangible. Baer admits he "always found it difficult to imagine the earth as an orange moving around the sun which is a grapefruit," and that the page-sized dot of the sun is really the grapefruit — using faith in science, Magellan, and the earth's shadow on the moon to bridge intuition and fact.
The orbit's real numbers. The earth's path is a mild ellipse; closest approach is 91,350,000 miles and farthest 94,455,000 miles, a 3.4% distance difference producing about a 7% swing in radiation intensity (which falls with the square of distance). Earth is nearest the sun in January, farthest in July; it spends about 186 days with the sun north of the equator and 179 days south, making Southern-Hemisphere summers shorter and warmer (an imbalance masked by that hemisphere's ocean cover).
Tilt creates seasons. The 23½° axial tilt — not orbital distance — drives the seasons; a table gives the sun's declination (degrees above/below the equator) on the twentieth of each month, and a cast shadow can therefore "give the date."
Other worlds, other relationships. "Autumn on Uranus" contrasts the solar relationships of other planets, whose extreme tilts and orbits make seasons unlike Earth's.
Energy literacy and appropriate technology. The later chapters translate abstract energy units into human-scale images (a dog as a 50-watt source, a person's worth in energy) and then into do-it-yourself solar hardware — bubble and flat-plate collectors, rock-storage air loops, heat pipes, engines, and Skylids.

Significance

Sunspots is a document of 1970s appropriate-technology and solar-design culture from Zomeworks, one of the movement's key New Mexico workshops. Its pedagogy — explaining hard celestial mechanics through oranges, grapefruit, windshields, and shadows, then handing the reader buildable solar devices — parallels the Fullerian aim of making science graspable and resource-efficient, which is why it sits alongside Fuller's works in this corpus despite Baer's distinct authorship.

Sources

sunspots.md — full extracted book text
sunspots/index.md — project index
sunspots/ — source project root (EPUB, MOBI, PDF)

Sunspots

Structure

Core ideas

Significance

See Also

Sources