"EXTENSIVE DAMAGE" TO SOLAR DATA SERVERS: For the rest of the year, Daily Sun images on Spaceweather.com will look a little different. Normally, we share full-disk images from NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO). However, a broken pipe and subsequent flood at Stanford University's Joint Science Operations Center has caused extensive damage to many SDO data servers. Repairs won't be complete until 2025. Now for the good news: Our readers are filling in the gap. Daily images of the sun are routinely taken by many skilled amateur astronomers around the world. We will be sharing their results right here. 

mf: NASA and NOAA announced in October that Solar Maximum has arrived. Only half of the sun is paying attention. The sun's southern hemisphere continues to dominate sunspot production:

Composite of daily sun images from NASA's SDO. Credit: Şenol ŞANLI and Uğur İKİZLER 

This is a composite image of all sunspots in November 2024. Southern sunspots outnumbered northern sunspots 4:1 according to  hemispheric datafrom the Royal Observatory of Belgium (WDC-SILSO). This is the 6th month in a row the south has significantly outperformed the north. You can see the same pattern visually in composite images from October, September, August, July, and, to a lesser extent, June 2024.

What’s going on? Solar physicists have long known that the two hemispheres of the sun don’t always perform in sync. Solar Max in the north can be offset from Solar Max in the south by as much as two years, a delay known as the "Gnevyshev gap." This means half of Solar Max may still lie in the future--welcome news for sky watchers eager for more years of auroras. Stay tuned!