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I have seen news that there have been several sunspots from cycle 24 but I have not been able to see them.  My question is:  When will we start to see proper sunspots again?  Also, are the sunspots that are currently being reported proper sunspots or is it that there is just nothing else to see?  

The sun's spots are coming back. We know the new ones are from the new cycle because of the polarity of the magnetic field. Most sunspots are associated with magnetic loops which have in/out or out/in polarity, with the polarity different in the different hemispheres. For the new sunspot cycle, the loop direction reverses. You can see today's magnetic field image by going to http://sunearth.gsfc.nasa.gov/spaceweather/ and then scrolling down to "Michelson Doppler Imager (MDI) - SOHO Mission" that shows you the magnetic fields on the sun (black is pointing IN, and white is pointing OUT, and gray is weak or pointing perpendicular to the way you are looking. ) In that image you can see the magnetic loops as double-spots, with the black to the right in the top half of the picture and the black to the left in the bottom half of the picture. So once you see a magnetic loop on that image, then you can look closely at the "white light" image (which is labeled "MDI with Numbers") and sometimes see the dark spot associated with the magnetic loop. We just had a sunspot rotate off the Sun to the right edge.. you can still see its effects in some of the SOHO EUV images. But really good really big sunspots could happen any time, but we'll see a lot more of them in a couple of years. Keep watching!!

Solar activity is now at minimum so there are only a few sunspots (or none) to be seen. The Sun should fire up soon and then

you can spot several sunspots each day. The solar cycle prediction panel (http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/SolarCycle/SC24/index.html)

has predicted that the next solar maximum will occur by the end of 2012. You can see the daily sunspot number for example from

http://www.spaceweather.com/ . Today Sun is again blank, there is zero sunspots. Year 2008 has been the "blankest" year in terms

of sunspots of the past 50 years. There were two hundred days in a row without sunspots. 

 

 

I think 2012 is a bit too far away for a school project. Also this graph

http://www.nwra-az.com/spawx/ssne24.html

doesn't seem to show any increase in sunspots.  Nice spacesuit by the way.

As recently as last week, there were two new cycle sunspots.  One of them however, numbered by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA) as Active Region (AR) 11006, lasted for only one day.  You can expect old cycle sunspots to continue to appear for a while; it is perfectly normal for the cycles to overlap.  Scientists have attempted to predict exactly when the minimum of the old cycle would occur and when the new cycle would begin, but we apparently don't yet understand the solar cycle well enough to be able to do so accurately.  With no science behind it, a colleague and I compared the shape of cycle 11 (a graph of sunspot number versus time) with cycle 23 (the current cycle, 24 is the new one).  By eye, the cycles are very similar.  IF (that's a BIG if) cycle 23 is like cycle 24, we can expect the new cycle to take off within about three months. 

I have a little table of recently observed sunspots (since June) posted on http://hinode.msfc.nasa.gov.  If you'd like to see the graphs of solar cycles (and more information), go to  http://solarscience.msfc.nasa.gov/SunspotCycle.shtml.  Click on the graph of "sunspot number" at the top of the page.  The current cycle (23) is the very last one plotted (centered around 2001).  Cycle 11 is the last one on the top plot, ending around 1880.