Big but Tame Sunspot Group 
One of the largest sunspot groups of this solar cycle rotated across the Sun, but was surprisingly quiet in terms of producing solar activity (July 3-11, 2013). Towards the end of the clip, the spot seems to be fading, but it still has the potential to unleash major flares. These images are called Intensitygrams, taken by the Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager instrument on SDO. To give a sense of sunspot size here, a couple of Earths could stretch across the largest spot.
Search Tag(s): sunspots, HMI, intensitygram
Movies
- spots_big.mp4 - mp4
- spots_big_best.mov - mov
- Spots_big_sm.mov - mov