The 155-day solar period in the sixteenth century and later

Recent interest in short solar periods has been stimulated by the discovery of a peak period of about 150-160 days in very energetic solar flares and hard X-ray flares. Auroral data are used here as a proxy for solar activity to show the presence of the peak in data from 1570 to 1573 and in some other time periods. The data are also used to show the absence or lack of prominence of this peak at other times in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.