Two giant sunspots, easily visible to the unaided eye with proper filtration, are visible in this false color image. Active region 10488 is at left, and region 10486 is at right. North is to the left in this image.

Region 10486 was extremely active, having shot out a powerful X-11 flare and coronal mass ejection that caused widespread aurora on the Earth. The same spot had previously erupted with an even-more-powerful X-17 rated flare and coronal mass ejection previously.

Several days later, the same sunspot complex fired off the most intense x-ray flare ever recorded by a spacecraft. The flare totally saturated the detectors for 11 minutes. These detectors are only capable of registering a maximum level of X17.4, but the true intensity of the flare was extrapolated to be X28.

Sunspots are areas of the Sun's photosphere that are cooler than the surrounding regions. Cooler being relative in this case, with the sunspot having a temperature of about 3,700 degrees Kelvin, about 2,000 degrees cooler than the rest of the solar surface. Sunspots are only appear dark in contrast to the rest of the brilliant surface.

The intricate detail visible around sunspots is caused by the Sun's magnetic fields and the interaction of ionized gas in the Sun's atmosphere.

• Lens: 130 EDT f/8 Astro-Physic's Apochromatic Triplet Refractor
• F/stop: f/32 with 20mm Orthoscopic eyepiece projection
• Exposure: Single 1/640th second exposure
• Mount: Tracking, polar aligned, not guided
• Camera: Nikon D1H DSLR
• Mode: 12-bit Raw
• ISO: 500
• White Balance: (Raw)
• In-Camera Noise Reduction: Off
• Filter: Baader Solar Filter
• Temp: NR
• Time 12:30 p.m. EST
• Date October 30, 2003
• Location: Voorhees, NJ, USA
• Calibration: None
• Processing: The raw images were then imported into Photoshop 7 with the Adobe Camera Raw plug-in and were exposure adjusted, contrast increased and sharpened in the ACR module. Because the images were low noise from having been shot at ISO 200, noise reduction in the ACR module was set to zero.

  All of the images were then opened in Photoshop and enlarged to 200 percent and examined for sharpness and the best image was selected.

  The image was further adjusted in Photoshop for tonality, and sharpened with an unsharp mask of 100 percent, 0.5 pixels and 0 levels. Another unsharp mask of 100 percent, 2 pixels and 2 levels was applied. False color was added with a layer in the darken blending mode.

• Notes: A series of approximately 300 images were taken manually one after another with the camera in anti-mirror shock mode and triggered with the self-timer to reduce vibrations.

  Shooting 300 images was a method of hoping to luck out and get one with a moment of especially good seeing. This technique goes back many decades and has recently been advanced greatly with web cams for planetary photography where videos are shot at a high frame rate and specially designed software selects the sharpest frames and stacks them together to create a low-noise image. I discuss this method in depth in my book A Guide to DSLR Planetary Imaging.

  In the case of a web cam, the images are relatively low resolution in terms of the total number of pixels, but the resolution of the seeing is matched to the image size at the focal plane producing excellent results. In this case a larger file size of approximately 3.5 megabytes was produced by the Nikon digital camera.