Sunspots are areas on the surface of the Sun where the magnetic field has become tangled up making one patch cooler than the surrounding area. The temperature of the sunspot will be around 4,000 degrees compared to around 6,000 degrees for the surrounding area. The cooler area shows up as dark spot on the surface. Sunspots can be very big - the biggest can be up to around 50,000 miles across.
It has been well publisized that the Sun has been rather quiet over the last few years. The Sun goes through a fairly regular cycle every 11 years or so where it changes from having very few sunspots to lots of sunspots and back again. The current low period has been going on for longer than usual but there are signs that activity is beginning to pick up again (last year 71% of days showed no sunspots compared to 16% so far this year).
This increase in activity left me optimistic that once the recent spell of rain had abated I would be spotting spots straight away. Alas no. The clouds cleared at the start of a mini-streak of 5 spot-free days. This morning was a different story. After consulting the latest space weather, I knew that I'd have at least one sunspot to look at, and here it is:
Sunspot 1101 is clearly visible in the bottom-right quadrant. There was quite a lot of whispy cloud around (as can be seen in the picture) so I settled for a few afocal snaps rather than getting out the webcam. It will be interesting to see what resolution can be achieved on a clearer day and what happens to sunspot 1101 in the future.
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