Now You See It, Now You Don’t.

A large, perhaps 200,000 mile long, dark filament with a total mass of a billions of tons or more has been visible on the southern hemisphere of the Sun for the past several days (lower right side of the upper image), but it was gone the next day (lower image). Where’d it go? The filamentContinue reading “Now You See It, Now You Don’t.”

Throwin’ Heat

“It looks like a baseball,” my wife commented when I proudly displayed my photo of the Sun. I had to admit that the markings across the solar disk did resemble baseball stitching, and I do remember playing with some very raggedy looking baseballs when I was a kid. It is obviously a fastball, because theContinue reading “Throwin’ Heat”

Now You See It, Now You Don’t

A large “blemish” can be seen on the lower right part of the upper photo, but not on the lower photo taken a day later. Don’t you wish face cream worked like that? Well, maybe not; this “blemish” is over 100,000 miles long, weighs on the order of billions of tons, and was explosively ejectedContinue reading “Now You See It, Now You Don’t”

In Less Than a Week

***NERD ALERT!*** On November 30, 2022, it appeared that the Sun would be totally without spots for only the second time this year, since the only active region with spots was rapidly fading from view. The next day, however, two new spots appeared and in the following five days the sunspots went from nearly zeroContinue reading “In Less Than a Week”

Filament, Then Prom, Then Gone

Powerful magnetic fields sometimes levitate billions of tons of material above the surface of the Sun which is known as a filament. When solar rotation moves it to the limb of the Sun, it is called a prominence, or prom for short, and reveals how high it is. The whole prominence/filament is over 100,000 milesContinue reading “Filament, Then Prom, Then Gone”