StarDate Susitna 3-10-24, by Kathleen Fleming

Kathleen Fleming found some astro-stuff to talk about in the coming week: how daylight saving time affects stargazing, the moon passing Jupiter, this month’s “failure to set” lunar phase, and Aurora. Learn about these and other astro-topics in this edition of StarDate Susitna.

The following images of the Sun were taken with the Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager on the orbiting Solar Dynamic Observatory (SDO/HMI) and were accessed via spaceweather.com, which maintains an archive of past pages.  They are all from March:  2020 (during solar minimum), 2021, 2022, 2023, and just several days ago in 2024.  Presented in this way Kathleen wanted to show the progression of a sunspot cycle: no sunspot, then spots starting to show up far from the equator, and eventually becoming more numerous including right on the Sun’s equator.  In the last photo, that big sunspot complex right in the middle triggered higher than usual Aurora expectations at the end of last week.