One Big Spot 
A single but quite large sunspot dominated views of the Sun this week as it rotated across part of the Sun (Apr. 12-14, 2016). The image was taken by the magnetic imager on SDO, which records the flow of plasma towards and away from the imager in strong black or strong white tones. Sunspot regions are areas of intense magnetism so that plasma is being pulled along magnetic field lines between areas of opposite polarity. This particular sunspot was fairly organized so that any eruptions from it thus far have been minor. To give a sense of scale, at least three Earths could fit across the darkest area. Credit: Solar Dynamics Observatory, NASA.
Search Tag(s): hmi, sunspots
Movies
- bigspot_mag_big.mp4 - mp4
- bigspot_mag_sm.mp4 - mp4