I took this image on Saturday, 6/12/2021 at 15:13 UT. It shows a rather large sunspot just coming into view on the sun's northwestern limb. By Sunday, it had been numbered as Sunspot AR2833. In actuality, it is really Sunspot AR2824 coming back into view after spending a couple of weeks on the Sun's far side, but renumbering in such cases is traditional. My rough calculations show it to be close to the size of the earth. The image was taken from a single 20 s video which seemed to have better focus than the others. I stacked 30 of the best images out of 756 frames via lucky capture to get the final result.

For some time now, astronomers have been expecting the sun to break out of a minimum in the sunspot cycle and a recent spate of isolated sunspots has suggested the breakout is imminent. Interestingly, two solar physicists, Scott McIntosh of NCAR and Bob Leamon of U Maryland, have studied how vast horizontal bands of opposing magnetism migrate from the sun's poles toward the equator. When they meet, the resulting magnetic annihilation, the scientists believe, can trigger the beginning of a new sunspot cycle. Moreover, when the duration between magnetic annihilations (called Termination Events) is relatively short, McIntosh and Leamon believe the ensuing sunspot cycle will be especially active. This is a minority view; most solar physicists give little credence to McIntosh and Leamon's hypothesis, including the part about migrating magnetic bands. But what's fun is that if the next Termination Event happens soon or is already happening, the time between it and the last Termination Event will be quite short and we could see record-breaking sunspot activity. We'll have a real-life observational experiment going on before our very eyes -- crazy sunspot activity or lazy sunspot activity will reveal whether or not McIntosh and Leamon are on to something!