A St. Patrick's Day Sun!
This is a really cool image:
This is a real image of the sun, but it's been run through a program to change the colour. Pretty cool, huh? This is not something you would see in space. Stars come in a multitude of colours, but not green.
I found this great Web site - spaceweather.com. It has a lot of great astronomy information, such as:
Counting sunspots is not as straightforward as it sounds. Suppose you looked at the Sun through a pair of (properly filtered) low power binoculars -- you might be able to see two or three large spots. An observer peering through a high-powered telescope might see 10 or 20. A powerful space-based observatory could see even more -- say, 50 to 100. Which is the correct sunspot number?
This is a real image of the sun, but it's been run through a program to change the colour. Pretty cool, huh? This is not something you would see in space. Stars come in a multitude of colours, but not green.They come in white, yellow, orange, red, blue and black [holes], but I don't think there are any other colours. Our sun is yellow but it began as white and has been slowly cooling over the last... I don't know... 600 million years? It will be many, many more years before this sun uses up its seemingly endless store of helium.
I found this great Web site - spaceweather.com. It has a lot of great astronomy information, such as:
"Scientists track solar cycles by counting sunspots -- cool planet-sized areas on the Sun where intense magnetic loops poke through the star's visible surface.
Counting sunspots is not as straightforward as it sounds. Suppose you looked at the Sun through a pair of (properly filtered) low power binoculars -- you might be able to see two or three large spots. An observer peering through a high-powered telescope might see 10 or 20. A powerful space-based observatory could see even more -- say, 50 to 100. Which is the correct sunspot number?
There are two official sunspot numbers in common use. The first, the daily "Boulder Sunspot Number," is computed by the NOAA Space Environment Center using a formula devised by Rudolph Wolf in 1848: R=k (10g+s), where R is the sunspot number; g is the number of sunspot groups on the solar disk; s is the total number of individual spots in all the groups; and k is a variable scaling factor (usually <1)>
Right: Rudolf Wolf devised the basic formula for calculating sunspots in 1848. Today, Wolf sunspot counts continue, since no other index of the sun's activity reaches into the past as far and as continuously. An avid astronomical historian and an unrivaled expert on sunspot lore, Wolf confirmed the existence of a cycle in sunspot numbers. He also more accurately determined the cycle's length to be 11.1 years by using early historical records. [more]
As a rule of thumb, if you divide either of the official sunspot numbers by 15, you'll get the approximate number of individual sunspots visible on the solar disk if you look at the Sun by projecting its image on a paper plate with a small telescope."
The Boulder number (reported daily on SpaceWeather.com) is usually about 25% higher than the second official index, the "International Sunspot Number," published daily by the Sunspot Index Data Center in Belgium. Both the Boulder and the International numbers are calculated from the same basic formula, but they incorporate data from different observatories.
Right: Rudolf Wolf devised the basic formula for calculating sunspots in 1848. Today, Wolf sunspot counts continue, since no other index of the sun's activity reaches into the past as far and as continuously. An avid astronomical historian and an unrivaled expert on sunspot lore, Wolf confirmed the existence of a cycle in sunspot numbers. He also more accurately determined the cycle's length to be 11.1 years by using early historical records. [more]
As a rule of thumb, if you divide either of the official sunspot numbers by 15, you'll get the approximate number of individual sunspots visible on the solar disk if you look at the Sun by projecting its image on a paper plate with a small telescope."
You may be sitting there thinking, "Who cares about sunspots?" Wel, if you value electronic communications of any kind, then you care - more than you think! These sunspots create a lot of solar activity and this can easily screw up all different kinds of frequency issues.
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