Last summer, my colleague Michael Bakich, a senior editor at Astronomy, kindly gave me a special filter that fits on the front of my 4-inch Celestron NexStar, thus allowing me to observe the Sun without turning my eyeball into a poached egg.
I looked at the Sun with the new setup. Nada. Nothing!
Thanks to this cool graphic just released by NASA, it’s clear why the Sun is so, well, boring to look at lately. We are in a deep “solar minimum,” a period in the 11 (or so) year sunspot cycle where things are as quiet as an umbrella shop on a sunny day.
Dramatic statistic time: As of March 31, there were no sunspots on 78 of the year's 90 days (87 percent). For more details, check out this well-done little report from Science@NASA.
Image credit: NASA/MSFC/Hathaway