IMHO - Shouldn't a returning Sunspot just be named XXXX-2 now that we can reasonable track them on the far side?

it seems kinda odd to just "rename" a spot just because it went to the other side...

 

Be like an alien naming a continent.. Number Ork then when it rorates back around is now continent Bok.

 

 

 

You can never know for sure if a region is a returning sunspot region or if it developed on the far side at a similar location as the departed sunspot region you want to renumber. For large regions like 3664 you can be pretty sure it is the same returning region of course but still, we do not have tools to reliably track sunspot regions on the far side so yeah...

We can't 100% reliably say if a sunspot makes a return. There is certainly a small chance that regions may disappear and a new one will come up on the far side.

1 hour ago, Jesterface23 said:

We can't 100% reliably say if a sunspot makes a return. There is certainly a small chance that regions may disappear and a new one will come up on the far side.

This is why we need another spacecraft like STEREO, with a higher budget and constantly on the farside!

2 hours ago, Loganas said:

This is why we need another spacecraft like STEREO, with a higher budget and constantly on the farside!

The only place is point L3, which is an unstable orbit and probes located there would have to use correction engines from time to time, which in turn consumes more fuel. More fuel means more mass of the probe, and more mass means greater costs of getting the rocket into space. In my opinion, it is not profitable for space agencies

49 minutes ago, Adrian Kobyłecki said:

The only place is point L3

L3 may not even be an option due to probably no data.

10 hours ago, bostonareahuman said:

ИМХО - разве возвращающемуся солнечному пятну не должно быть присвоено имя XXXX-2 теперь, когда мы можем разумно отслеживать их на дальней стороне?

кажется довольно странным просто "переименовывать" пятно только потому, что оно ушло на другую сторону...

 

Это как инопланетянин, называющий континент.. Затем, когда оно поворачивает обратно, номер Ork становится континентом Bok.

 

 

 

First of all, my friend, it is not me, not you, and not all of us here who assign numbering to spots. Perhaps that says it all - it's just not in our competence. Therefore, we can only use ready-made designations and sometimes try to compare them with groups of spots that were already in our field of view.
🙏

10 hours ago, Loganas said:

This is why we need another spacecraft like STEREO, with a higher budget and constantly on the farside!

We need surround sound rather than stereo 😜😂, like 5-7 satellites all orbiting the sun so we can see it from all angles, all the time.
 

* sigh * one can only dream!

7 hours ago, Jesterface23 said:

L3 may not even be an option due to probably no data.

Yeah, that's definitely another problem. There has been suggestions of using a relay at L4 and/or L5 for it, but it definitely gets complicated at that point. Perhaps an idea would be to use a swarm of satellites like STA or STB, launched into the same orbit but at different intervals, since they wouldn't interfere with each other's orbits like planetary masses would.

Is there any particular reason stationing satellites at the L1 points of other planets wouldn't be viable?

8 minutes ago, HalfFeralHuman said:

Is there any particular reason stationing satellites at the L1 points of other planets wouldn't be viable?

A satellite could get there, but it won't stop there easily

We have a few ways of tracking sunspot regions on the far side of the sun these days:

• The Stanford Seismic Monitor computed from data from the Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager (HMI) on the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), which measures ripples in the sun to get an idea of where sunspot regions are all over the sun's surface: http://jsoc.stanford.edu/data/farside/
• The Global Oscillation Network Group run by the National Solar Observatory (also using helioseismic techniques): https://farside.nso.edu/
• The Solar Wind Anisotropies instrument (SWAN) on the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO), which measures effects of solar wind emanating from far-side sun spots: https://soho.nascom.nasa.gov/data/summary/swan/
• Direct observations from Mars! Currently, Perseverance has a view of a good chunk of the far side. This of course varies depending on where earth & Mars are in their orbits.

These aren't perfect, but when you have a big beefy sunspot region that's easily visible from Mars and/or is throwing lots of shockwaves or jets of solar wind around, there's a somewhat better indication now that we're actually looking at the same region coming all the way around the far side, rather than a new one appearing in about the same place as an old one.