Revisiting Sunspots

Today marks one year since I completed an activity analyzing sunspots! As one of the initial experiments in the Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth's astrophysics course, I gained my first glimpse of the Sun, which would lead to my current investigation of solar storms. 

Using a Sunspotter Solar Telescope, repositioned every couple of seconds to keep the Sun in the frame, my peers and I were able to view the teeny tiny dots that correlated to areas of intense magnetic activity. During the activity, I copied down the relative positions of each sunspot in my notebook. I followed up my observations by visiting spaceweatherlive.com, where I compared the sunspots visible in the solar telescope to all the ones currently observable. Check out the comparison below!

Sunspots found on the Sun on July 19, 2024.

Reflection of the Sun and its sunspots on July 19, 2024.

Sunspots found on the Sun on July 19, 2025.

Even after completing the program, I enjoy checking the site to see how active the Sun is on that specific day. See the numerous sunspots from today, compared to sunspots seen one year ago! As the Sun reaches its solar maximum, the intensity of sunspots increases, signaling more intense magnetic activity. On the graphic from today, note that, despite there being fewer active regions, the ones that are there are much, much larger. For example, sunspot 4143 covers approximately 820 million square kilometers, around 0.027% of the Earth-facing solar surface. To put that to scale, the entire Earth’s surface area covers 510 million square kilometers. Everything on Earth can fit into that one specific spot! 

Whenever you read this post, take a minute and look at the site for yourself. I personally find it incredibly cool that this information is free and available for anyone to access, and the graphics depicting this phenomenon are really interesting!