Just joined - 2994 Question

[Strom]

I haved been following for a couple months and soaking up as much as I can, as fast as I can.

My first quesiton:  It looks like 2994 has two large spots.   How do they decide to combine them in to 2996, rather than creating two numbers, one for each.

[Vancanneyt Sander]

1 uur terug, Strom zei:

I haved been following for a couple months and soaking up as much as I can, as fast as I can.

My first quesiton:  It looks like 2994 has two large spots.   How do they decide to combine them in to 2996, rather than creating two numbers, one for each.

 

As it’s a beta(-gamma) region, it’s bipolar (two polarities = beta) thus 2994 consists of negative polarity spots and positive polarity spots and they act as one region. So no need to define more numbers as sunspot regions are a collection of sunspots that interact together as a bipolar (beta) region (unless it’s an alpha region with single polarity but that’s mostly one spot 😜).