SUNSPOT MONITORING – AUGUST 24, 2018

Here are today’s solar images taken from Al Sadeem Observatory, August 24, 2018.

The sky was clear with light air turbulence making the seeing and transparency good at the time these images were taken.

AR2719 was seen regaining more sunspots and magnetic complexity. Meanwhile, a new active region (encircled, recently designated as AR2720) is emerging just north of AR2719. This will be closely monitoring on its development that could affect the intensity solar activity in the next few days. The latest sunspot number (based on visual count and Wolf number calculation) is 19. However, both active regions did not produce any significant flaring activity over the past 24 hours. Few prominences at the limbs (mostly small ones), including a fairly large pyramid-shaped prominence at the southeastern limb, and the associated plages of the upper-mentioned sunspot groups were distinctively captured in H-alpha imagery.

Space weather agencies* forecast solar activity to remain at very low levels with chances of weak X-ray fluxes or flares ranging up to B-class (possibly some isolated C-class) intensity, mainly from the two active regions (ARs). The extent of the frequency and intensity of the Sun’s activity will highly depend on the magnetic flux fluctuations happening in the visible ARs in the coming days. Close monitoring is being conducted by numerous space weather agencies for any significant development.

*Technical reports courtesy of Solar Influence Data Center (SIDC), NOAA-Space Weather Prediction Center (NOAA-SWPC)

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