Giant Sunspot Group

Solar Cycle 25 - Sunspot Group - Captured 08 June 2021. Altair Astro 66mm Refractor on Star Adventurer Equatorial Mount. QHY5-11 mono camera. Stack of two SER videos. Credit: Pip Stakkert.

"Pip recently processed data captured earlier in the month and has managed to bring out some of the detail in this giant group of sunspots pictured close to the solar limb. The image shows some surface granulation of the photosphere and the darkening of the solar disk towards the limb. To give some idea of scale, the big sunspot group near the top of the enlarged view below, is roughly the size of the Earth!" - Kurt Thrust current Director of the Jodrell Plank Observatory.

" The enlarged view of the sunspots provides hints of the churning convection cells that make up the photosphere which is visible in white light. The Sun's photosphere is composed of convection cells named granules, which are rising columns of superheated (5,800 °C) plasma. Each cell is about 1,000 km in diameter.  You can observe the the same granulation in the surface of  boiling liquids on Earth but on a much reduced scale. The solar plasma cools as it rises and then descends in the narrow spaces between the granules. This rise and fall  is repeated over and over again" - Joel Cairo CEO of the Jodrell Plank Observatory..