Massive sunspot 3354 action - is this the big one?

 V0.2 14JUL23 

Solar activity in the shape of sunspots continues to provide plenty for observers - but here is a trip down memory lane for a proper "moment" - in July 14th 2000 - the space weather website tells the tale..

At about 11 a.m. in western Europe, where Bastille Day celebrations were underway in France, Earth-orbiting satellites reported an X5.7-class solar flare. Within the hour, energetic particles accelerated by the flare reached our planet. Protons and electrons hit the atmosphere and created a cascade of radiation that reached all the way to the ground--a rare "GLE."

"People flying in commercial jets at high latitudes would have received double their usual radiation dose," says Clive Dyer of the University of Surrey Space Centre in Guildford UK, who studies extreme space weather. "It was quite an energetic event--one of the strongest of the past 20 years."

V0.1 30JUN23
Spaceweather.com continues to chronicle the approach of the 11 year sunspot/solar maximum - cycle 25 - with news of a major developing sunspot group facing earth. The chances of this leading to a major flare and CME are pretty good - but we have no archived precedent to guess at the possibility of a Carrington level event. Meanwhile, the spaceweather community is bracing for a "big one".

GIANT SUNSPOT ALERT: When this week began, sunspot AR3354 didn't exist. Now it is 10 times wider than Earth and still growing. The sunspot burst into view on June 27th, breaching the surface of the sun, then blossoming into a giant over the next 48 hours: movie.

AR3354 is so big, amateur astronomers can see details normally reserved for the world's greatest telescopes. Michael Karrer sends this picture of the sunspot's dark heart from his backyard observatory in Austria 

Sunspot AR3354 - it's big

Despite its gigantic size, the sunspot was not as easy to photograph as I expected," says Karrer. "The jetstream brought variable seeing to my observatory. But in a few moments of fair conditions I was able to capture this high-resolution image."

Karrer's photo shows that the sunspot's heart is not completely dark. It is peppered by "umbral dots"--incandescent balls of plasma rising and falling in the sunspot's core. Researchers believe they are turbulent convection cells, which dredge up heat from ~1000 km below. The same kind of motions can be seen in a pan of water boiling on a hot stove. The photo also resolves hundreds of "penumbral filaments," fine magnetic tubes that transport energy out of the sunspot.

While many astronomers are using telescopes to examine the sunspot, telescopes are not required. AR3354 can be seen without any magnification. If you have eclipse glasses, put them on and take a look. Solar flare alerts: SMS Text

more images: from Stuart Green of Preston, Lancashire, UK; from Francisco A. Rodriguez of Vega de San Mateo, Gran Canaria, Canary Islands; from Mahdi Rahimi of Esfan, Iran; from Michael Karrer of Austria