Astrophotographer John Chumack. captured the heart-shaped sunspot from his backyard Observatory in Dayton, Ohio on April 12, 2016.
Credit: John Chumack | www.galacticimages.com
You can’t help falling in love with the recent sunspot AR2529 and that’s exactly what happened to astrophotographer John Chumack.
Chumack captured the heart-shaped sunspot from his backyard Observatory in Dayton, Ohio on April 12.
“I caught sunspot AR2529 flaring at lunch time in this close-up view,” he wrote in an email to Space.com. “[It] looks like a dachshund dog face with folded over ears or a heart.”
The sunspot was large enough to hold two Earths as it crossed the face of the sun in April, making it a great target for amateur astronomers to safely observe.
Warning: NEVER look directly at or photograph the sun unless you have the proper protective equipment . Serious and permanent eye damage can result.
Sunspots are dark patches on the surface of the sun that are a bit cooler than surrounding areas. As the term “active region” suggests, sunspots serve as launchpads for solar flares and coronal mass ejections (CMEs) — huge eruptions that send clouds of solar plasma racing into space at millions of miles per hour.
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