Twin Terrors

Sunspots look like pimples on the face of the sun. In the case of the sun, though, it's acne problem occurs every 11 years, the cycle starting with a few pimples and building up to an outburst of blotchy rashes at its peak. Fortunately for me, the sun is currently in an active phase of its 11-year solar cycle. That's why last weekend saw the sun firing off one of the year's more spectacular solar eruptions, with super-hot solar filaments erupting and arcing into space and snaking between two huge sunspots - AR 1538 and AR 1540. Below is a video I took yesterday of these two sunspots. It may look like a single dark blob at first but careful inspection of the video will reveal that the 'blob' actually consists of a pair of sunspots.

Processing the video above with an astronomical image stacking program such as Registax reveals the two sunspots in greater detail, below. The two sunspots appear quite identical, like two evil twins spitefully spewing deadly plasma a (as well as a much smaller sunspot to the south) nd radiation towards poor little Earth. Sunspots are basically magnets - well, magnets with the magnetic force perhaps 8,000 times greater than the magnetic field around our entire planet. But just like any magnet, it has opposite north and south poles of positive and negative force. Sunspots therefore tend to form in pairs, just like the ones I captured in my images above - one with negative and one with positive polarity. The twins are often side by side, parallel with the equator and they rotate with the sun from west to east.

Zooming in on the sunspot with a 2X Barlow lens, you can see more clearly below the two dark spots (the central umbrae, where the magnetic field is approximately vertical to the Sun's surface), as well as the surrounding penumbra, which is lighter, where the magnetic field is more inclined.

Astronomers expect the current solar cycle, known as Solar Cycle 24, to peak in 2013, so probably lots for me to observe and video capture for quite a while yet - stay tuned!

All photographs on this page  © Sabri Zain 2012.