Posted on 05/03/2009 3:48:42 PM PDT by TaraP
Spotless Days
A spotless day is a day without sunspots, a day when the face of the sun is utterly blank. Spotless days never occur during Solar Max when the sun is active, but they are common during solar minimum, the opposite phase of the 11-year sunspot cycle when the sun is very quiet. By counting spotless days, we can keep track of the depth and longevity of a solar minimum.
By the standard of spotless days, the ongoing solar minimum is the deepest in a century: NASA report. In 2008, no sunspots were observed on 266 of the year's 366 days (73%). To find a year with more blank suns, you have to go all the way back to 1913, which had 311 spotless days (85%): The lack of sunspots in 2008, made it a century-level year in terms of solar quiet. Remarkably, sunspot counts for 2009 have dropped even lower. As of March 31st, there were no sunspots on 78 of the year's 90 days to date (87%).
Current stretch: 9 days Updated April 4, 2009
"Current Stretch" is the number of consecutive days the sun has been blank. The 100-year record is 92 consecutive spotless days in April, May and June of 1913.
2009 Total: 81 days (87%) Updated April 4, 2009
"2009 Total" is the total number of days and the percentage of days in 2009 that the sun has been blank. The 100-year record for a full year is 311 spotless days (85%) in 1913.
Since 2004: 592 days Updated April 4, 2009
The first blank sun of the ongoing solar minimum appeared in 2004. "Since 2004" tells us the total number of spotless days since that time. The 100-year record for total spotless days in an entire multi-year minimum is 1019 spotless days in the years around 1913.
Typical Solar Min: 485 days
Looking back at the last ten solar minima (not including the ongoing minimum), we can count the total number of spotless days in each and calculate an average: 485 spotless days. The average exceeds the number of days in a year because solar minima last much longer than one year. The fact that the ongoing solar minimum has already racked up 590+ spotless days with no end in sight tells us that it is much deeper and longer than average.
RAINADOES! We’re Having one right now! My bar-b-q!
If Congress just passed a law making Pi equal to 3, the sun would be squeezed in the middle, causing sunspots to pop out. But don’t tell Nancy and Harry!
Bush’s Fault
Hey, the moonbats are still blaming him for everything that goes wrong!
Keep those long sleeved shirts available for those cooler evenings this summer!
Nekkid Sun ping!
At least you won’t have a boring bar-b-q!
none today..... :-(
This is just an inconvenient fact for the global warming crowd.
About sundown today the noise floor went way down on 60M, at least on the West coast, and there was a group of guys on 5366.5 in mobiles going home from EMCOM/HAMCOM in Reno, and some others with even portable hand carried gear, most of them running 5-20W. I could hear them for quite a while and it was easy enough to work them at the 50W limit with my non-resonant antenna.
That was great, because it was the first time I have heard any activity on 60 other than government data transmissions, which are quite strong and not filtered out so well by my plain jane transceiver. Good to know a lot of them seem to take Sundays off.
Lucky for me, I have worked every country, so I nor longer
have to lust for great sunspots. DE W4EX
Just a few weeks ago I upgraded from Technician to Extra so more of HF is pretty new to me and I'm really just getting my feet wet. My interest these days is what I can do with portable (not necessarily QRP) and rapidly deployable gear. Presently I'm using my old FT747GX and various wire antennas but the RX is woefully inadequate and I really need to upgrade the transceiver. I'm considering the FT857D or something with similar features. Used and cheap of course.
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