Sunspot Monitoring at the Science Centre

by Sara Poirier - Researcher/Programmer / Astronomy & Space Sciences
September 2003

In celebration of International Astronomy Week, May 5^th - 11^th 2003, we took a closer look at a very important star— the Sun!

First, the Sun was projected through the eyepiece of a telescope onto a whiteboard. Then, we looked for darks spots on the surface of the Sun known as “sunspots”. Science Centre volunteers traced these on the whiteboard. Finally, we compared our observations with those at NASA’s Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO). Click here to see how we did!

Remember! Never look directly at the Sun, even with sunglasses. The human eye is not made to look at an object that bright. Looking at the sun for even a few seconds without proper protection can cause permanent eye damage, even blindness. Visit SpaceWeather.com to find out what the Sun looks like today and learn how you can perform this experiment yourself!

What are “sunspots”?
Most of the surface of the Sun is a really hot 5,800 degrees Celsius. However, small patches of it are cooler – around 3,900 degrees. These cooler areas appear darker than the surrounding material, resulting in the appearance of a “sunspot”.

Sunspots can change!
A sunspot’s lifetime can be as short as an hour or two, or be as long as several months. While they’re around, they can grow, shrink and change shape. All sunspots move across the surface of the Sun in synch with its rotation, which is about 30 days. The number of spots that can be seen on the surface of the sun increases and decreases in a regular pattern, known as the solar cycle, with the maximum number of sunspots occurring every 11 years.

Our observations concluded that the sun is in a quiet phase, and that the sunspots we observed migrated uniformly with the rotation of the Sun.