Spotlless Days

Spotless Days

A spotless day is a day without sunspots, a day when the face of the sun is utterly blank. Spotless days never occur during Solar Max when the sun is active, but they are common during solar minimum, the opposite phase of the 11-year sunspot cycle when the sun is very quiet. By counting spotless days, we can keep track of the depth and longevity of a solar minimum.

Absence of sun spots = cooler earth

By the standard of spotless days, the ongoing solar minimum is the deepest in a century: NASA report. In 2008, no sunspots were observed on 266 of the year's 366 days (73%). To find a year with more blank suns, you have to go all the way back to 1913, which had 311 spotless days (85%):



"Current Stretch" is the number of consecutive days the sun has been blank. The 100-year record is 92 consecutive spotless days in April, May and June of 1913.

"2009 Total" is the total number of days and the percentage of days in 2009 that the sun has been blank. The 100-year record for a full year is 311 spotless days (85%) in 1913.

Looking back at the last ten solar minima (not including the ongoing minimum), we can count the total number of spotless days in each and calculate an average: 485 spotless days. The average exceeds the number of days in a year because solar minima last much longer than one year. The fact that the ongoing solar minimum has already racked up 590+ spotless days with no end in sight tells us that it is much deeper and longer than average.

More here on Sunspots

What does the sun look like up close?

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see The Sun in Motion

Did you know a solar flare can make your toilet stop working?

That's the surprising conclusion of a NASA-funded study by the National Academy of Sciences entitled Severe Space Weather Events—Understanding Societal and Economic Impacts. In the 132-page report, experts detailed what might happen to our modern, high-tech society in the event of a "super solar flare" followed by an extreme geomagnetic storm. They found that almost nothing is immune from space weather—not even the water in your bathroom.

The most famous geomagnetic power outage happened during a space storm in March 1989 when six million people in Quebec lost power for 9 hours.

If a Solar Flare can do this to your toilet, imagine what an "EMP" can do to your computer, toaster, home alarm, printer, refrigerator, electric car etc.