WARNING! The Sun is extremely dangerous. Looking at it
with any sort of optical aid will result in instant blindness.
Look here to
see how I do it.
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Sunspot Designations |
Sunspots and Active Regions are numbered by the American National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and started on 5th January 1972. These numbers now exceed 10000 but often the leading "10" is omitted. The designations of current sunspots can be found on the SOHO site. A most useful archive of diagrams of the Sun showing the positions and designations of sunspots on a daily basis right back to January 1992 is available from The Institute for Astronomy, University of Hawaii. This link will take you to their archive page from where you can select a given image by date or browse by month. I find this particularly useful if I have imaged an interesting spot after some days of cloud, and I can look back and see when the spot appeared. | ||
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During 2003 I was able to take pictures of several sunspots daily and watch how they changed from day to day. So I have gathered the pictures of spots onto a separate page where you can see these changes. Click on this thumbnail or the one at the bottom of the following list. | ||
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Between the 5th and 15th of August 2003 we had a long spell
of fine weather in this part of the UK, and I managed to get pictures of the Sun every day. This animation shows all these pictures and illustrates the rotation of the Sun. [738K] |
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During October 2003 the Sun was very active. This short animation [481K] shows it from day to day. The animation is not as smooth as it might be because the spots were changing so rapidly (and I missed one day). Notice particularly the appearance of a ring-shaped spot on 27th October, which had broken up by the 30th. |
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The Sun on 28th October 2003. I have superimposed a picture of Jupiter on the same scale to show just how big these sunspots are. |
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Beware! Clicking on this image will download a 1.2Mbyte file.
To see a single frame, click here. When imaging the Sun, sometimes I catch strange objects crossing the Sun. |
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Click on the image for pictures of sunspots. | ||