Last Sunday my son and I were at the Griffith Park Observatory in Los Angeles. They have a cool sun telescope that projects a sun image about two feet in diameter. I’d never seen so many sunspots (we are near the peak of the eleven year cycle). There was one HUGE sunspot, many times the size of earth, in the center of the sun. On another projection we could actually faintly see flares on the sun’s outer disk. Our guide said the sun was very active right now.
My son is an astronautical engineer. He had a job at NASA when he was in college as a date technician on a solar observatory satellite. Essentially he took up close and personal photos of the Sun.
He got a couple showing huge plasma eruptions shooting away from earth. Pretty wild stuff.
He’s still at NASA driving satellites that fly in formation and keeping them from trading paint.
God is our Systems Administrator.
I was looking at the Sun in my scope, and I have never seen so many sunspots at once. Amazing.