Spaceweather.com has a real cool movie of two sunspots online, which shows how two sunspots merge together. You can download the file here (19 MB quicktime movie) and read a very interesting write-up at science@NASA.

This stuff looks indeed very weird and NASA calls this thing a trilobite, which are instinct prehistoric giant “snails”. Check out wikipedia for more details.

The movie has been taken by the Japanese Hinode Spacecraft, which was launched in September 2006 to study sunspots and solar storm.

Make sure you also take a look at NASA’s Hinode Page as they have a nice collection of pictures online.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 19th, 2007 and is filed under Astronomy, Ham Radio. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.