Solar viewing and question.

[Jnicholes]

Hi everyone,

Haven’t been on for a while, a lot going on. Mainly the reason is I got an elk tag unexpectedly. I’ve been very busy with that hunt.

Today, I got out to do some safe solar viewing. First time I did it in a while. I am attaching pictures of the first time I went solar viewing with today. There are a lot of differences between those two times, this leads to some questions.

First, the pictures. Photos were taken by my phone with an app called NightCap.

June 29th, 2021

October 27th, 2021

Question: They are obviously not the same sunspots, but why do the sunspots change positions? Is it rotation of the earth or sun?

Also, can someone help me understand what the solar cycle is?

Jared

[Makuser]

Hi Jared. The sun does indeed rotate. To help explain this, here is a screen shot from Raben Systems that I use from this morning. You can see the current active regions on the earth side and the far side.

As you can see the limbs are a mirror to our Earth east-west as we use a face on view the sun. And the solar activity cycle is 11 years long and we are in the increasing cycle #25. This is the period when the activity goes from a low sunspot count to high sunspot count. You can see from the solar map, that the sun is now very active and the active regions are now at AR2891! Near the height of sunspot activity short wave radio transmissions on Earth can reach great distances even into the vhf frequencies as it affects our ionosphere. On vhf it is often called sporadic E layer propagation. I hope this helps Jared and the best of regards.