The Dutch Observatory

February 15, 2015 on 3:50 pm | In Sun | Comments Off

Wow, the Sun’s activity is really slowing down.  Only 3 active regions with a total sunspot area of only 250 millionth and the Sun produced only 3 B-Class flares in the last 24 hours.  The large filaprom is still beautiful and today I was able to get more detail in my image of the 50,000 miles high structure.  Since SDO is now 5 years active, I checked back what the Sun did 5 years ago and the Sun was also very quiet. We were watching two active regions: AR1046 and 48 with a size of 70 and 10 millionth respectively which produced two C-class flares.  This all is in stark contrast to the week of October 24 2014, when we had 5 named active regions  with a total of 76 sunspots covering an area of 3090 millionth and we were leading up to the 27th when AR2192 by itself produced 13 C-Class Flare, 7 M-Class flare and even 2 X-Class Flares.