The Dutch Observatory

July 23, 2018 on 4:29 pm | In Sun | Comments Off

Today a correction to yesterday’s post.  The Sun showed a small sunspot from approx. 7/20 1500 UT until 7/21 2300 UT, which NOAA’s SWPC reported in their 0330 UT report on 7/22.  This marks yesterday as the end of a spotless spree and not as spotless day 252 as I reported.  The spot AR2716, covering 10 millionths,  lasted only one day.  So since today’s conditions did not allow me to observe, I spend the time making an annotated animation of the life of AR2716, cropping out the area of the spot using NOAA’s image data.  Click the thumbnail below to see the 3 second animation of AR2716 from birth during the afternoon of 7/20, until it disappeared just before midnight on 7/21. (It might take a little time to load the 7MB animation) The frames in the animation are in reality separated by approx. 1 hour each.  It is interesting to see how the spot generates a few pores which drift away from the central spot during the decay.