Many Sunspots Emerge & A Big Filament Snakes | Solar Storm Forecast 08.15.2021

Our Sun stays a bit on the quiet side this week, but it is definitely giving us some fun stuff to watch. We went from a spotless Sun to one with four sunspots in a matter of days! Although these new regions are quiet and likely wont give us any chance for big solar flares, we are nevertheless keeping our eyes on them as it is unusual to see so many sunspots emerge all at once. As for solar storms, our Sun is still firing a few, but none of them are Earth-directed. We also aren’t expecting any fast solar wind this week, so aurora photographers will likely need to focus on the ongoing Perseid meteor shower this week instead of aurora. Although the quiet conditions this week means radio propagation remains in the marginal range on Earth’s dayside, at least GPS/GNSS users can expect some decent signal reception pretty much all over the globe. Learn the details of the emerging sunspots, see the long snake-like filament that is rotating into view, catch up on aurora photos from recent solar storming, and see what else our Sun has in store this week.