There’s a lot of interesting things to see in the sky today – the bad news is they’re all happening in the direction of the Sun and impossible to see without special equipment. The good news, however, is that there are ways to see these events without looking directly at the Sun, which is ill-advised and likely dangerous to your vision.
Image: Sunspot 923 as seen through a SolarMax filter
Sunspot 923 is almost in the center of the Sun today, and can be seen using eclipse shades or making a pinhole camera. Over the weekend Damsel and I saw it when I used a pair of binoculars to image the solar disk on the floor.
Spaceweather.com has this to say about this giant sunspot:
This sunspot is utterly docile. Since it rounded the sun’s eastern limb last week, the behemoth has unleashed no big solar flares and expelled zero CMEs [coronal mass ejections]. Why so quiet? The sunspot’s magnetic field does not contain the sort of tangles and kinks that lead to instabilities and explosions. This could change, but for now sunspot 923 is merely photogenic.
The other activity up there is the passage of three planets near the sun. Bright Venus and larger but much further away Jupiter can be seen to the left of the Sun in this coronagraph. Mars, approaching the right side of the frame is about to disappear form the instrument’s field of view.
I’m told that it is very unusual to have three planets visible in the instrument simultaneously. Image courtesy of NASA/SOHO
UPDATE: APOD showed that there are actually four planets in the photo; Mercury is also visible.