This morning, I browsed my usual daily visits on the internet. When I got to the webpage at SpaceWeather.com, I noticed several sunspots were visible on the “Daily Sun” feature in the left sidebar. That made me have the urge to go out and capture an image of the sun over Arizona to see if I could resolve any of the sunspots. There were three distinct spots in my image, which I labeled, as seen on the right. The solar north pole is at about the ten o’clock point in the image I made. I didn’t bother to rotate the solar image to align the pole at the top as I sometimes do. Click on the image to enlarge.
I visited the SOHO Sunspot page to get the designation numbers of the sunspots in the photo, I noticed a link to a new feature called Helioviewer which purported to allow users anywhere make their own custom images and movies. After fooling with the website a bit, I made the video below to document the spots in my image. The motion starts about 24 hours before advancing to how the sun looked today. Solar north is up and the recording was made through a hydrogen alpha (or equivalent) filter. The bright spots are the location of the spots in my image above. See this screenshot from the Helioviewer site for reference.
