Sunspot with no spot, is a sunspot?

[Greg]

Is this the twilight zone, anybody want to gander at the so called sunpot and give me a thought.  

[Marcel de Bont]

What do you mean? If an active region has sunspots it's a sunspot group and will get assigned a number. If it is spotless it does not receive a number.

[Christopher S.]

According to http://www.solen.info/solar/ using 2k resolution SDO imagery, there are about 5 small spots in the 12773 region. It has officially been designated/detected by SWPC but not yet published in the data as delivered to this website, according to the STAR page.

STAR is very useful for gathering the information missed or otherwise interpreted loosely by SWPC. I do wonder why such a discrepancy exists between the two - perhaps because Alvestad is independent and SWPC is in a stronger "political" position, but regardless of that, I recommend checking STAR any time you see something that SWPC drops the ball on.

[Drax Spacex]

3 hours ago, Greg said:

Is this the twilight zone, anybody want to gander at the so called sunpot and give me a thought.  

I agree - the current HMI Intensitygram doesn't show any dark spot.  More of a grayish-white.  The fact that sunspot number has gone from 0 to 13 to 0 in the past few days shows it is a borderline call whether this active region (AR) contains "sunspots."

Taking the human element out of the loop, IMO, the solar flux index, which has been rising due this AR, is a more reliable summary metric to quantify solar activity.

[Vancanneyt Sander]

SWPC as well as SILSO observe the Sun during their observation hours when they use a telescope to observe the sun in white light and h-alpha. They draw up the synoptic map and then upload the official observation. When during the observation hours sunspots are observed, a number will get assigned to the sunspot region and the magnetic classification and spot classification gets assigned. If spots are gone in the next observation hours the next day, it won’t be numbered again and is designated as a spotless plage. This is also the reason that SILSO and SWPC can have different sunspot numbers because the observation hours are different. 
STAR uses only SDO and no physical observation of the sun. It would detect changes in a region more rapidly. 
so no conspiracy to seek here...

[Greg]

Just would like the same rules applied consistently ( no politics In science)  done it one way for the past 400 years.  Let's keep it that way

23 hours ago, Drax Spacex said:

I agree - the current HMI Intensitygram doesn't show any dark spot.  More of a grayish-white.  The fact that sunspot number has gone from 0 to 13 to 0 in the past few days shows it is a borderline call whether this active region (AR) contains "sunspots."

Taking the human element out of the loop, IMO, the solar flux index, which has been rising due this AR, is a more reliable summary metric to quantify solar activity.

Do that too,,,,,but don't mix them up  because the sunspots are a more real pristine data set with less ambiguity in involved,,,, because you can deceive people with instruments they don't have,, but you cant decieve my eyes,,,,in this example

[Christopher S.]

2 hours ago, Greg said:

Just would like the same rules applied consistently ( no politics In science)  done it one way for the past 400 years.  Let's keep it that way

Do that too,,,,,but don't mix them up  because the sunspots are a more real pristine data set with less ambiguity in involved,,,, because you can deceive people with instruments they don't have,, but you cant decieve my eyes,,,,in this example

To accuse anyone of deception, for which the connotation implies intent to falsify, is really a leap of logic. As Sander described, SWPC and SILSO have their routines, and literally anyone else can use SDO - it is a publicly available resource - to do their own checks, and use their own criteria. We have the same instruments.

[Greg]

 

22 uren geleden, Christopher S. zei:

To accuse anyone of deception, for which the connotation implies intent to falsify, is really a leap of logic. As Sander described, SWPC and SILSO have their routines, and literally anyone else can use SDO - it is a publicly available resource - to do their own checks, and use their own criteria. We have the same instruments.

Let's find out what's gonna happen global warming or global cooling,,reality bites sometimes

[goldminor]

Maybe they should call this sunspot a peek-a-boo sunspot as it is back again.

That made me wonder how often do they update the sunspot region page, and/or the SDO graphics?

[Vancanneyt Sander]

All the fuzz for a simple place/sunspot region... you'll notice when a big behemoth of a sunspot region appears it will have bigger differences since the observation hours and that will be another debate perhaps but don't make a fuzz about that too cuz it's normal. Sunspot regions can change a lot in 24h, spots come and go and the magnetic complexity can grow as well (sometimes rapid change in a few hours). When a region gets somewhat interesting (beta-gamma) we'll often check the region multiple times in a day to see how the magnetic structure changes and do our own analysis of it based on SDO data. Just to say, spots come and go even with a simple region...

PS.: Our sunspot page is updated every hour.