Solar Cycle 24

Kevin knows a lot about sunspots. A lot. He's a little more specific than I am about his reason for posting. Not only does he limit his writing to solar cycles, he limits his writing to one specific solar cycle: Solar Cycle 24. To give you a sense of how serious he is about his work, I give you screen shot of just one portion of his home page.

I'll let Kevin tell you in his own words why he is so worked up over Solar Cycle 24.

In 2006 Cycle 24 was initially predicted to be 30-50% stronger than the previous cycle 23 and the strongest in 50 years. Being that I am a Ham Radio operator and very active on VHF and interested in Aurora, I thought that starting a website dedicated to VHF and the upcoming Cycle would be a great idea. Since then my site has grown into my second full time job and the predictions of Cycle 24 has changed depending on who you talk to.

SolarCycle24.com will be your one stop source for everything Solar and Aurora as it relates to Cycle 24. You will find Real Time data, News, Charts, Images, Multimedia and much more. My goal is to put all important information from various sources into one spot. As soon as something important is happening on the sun, you will see it here first.

My main goal is to track and monitor Aurora openings on VHF including my favorite band 6 meters. I plan on logging all my personal contacts online and capturing the great aurora moments as they happen.

Here's an image of our sunspots as of today.

Here's a plot showing the sunspot frequency of the current solar cycle (24) compared to the previous solar cycle (23).

It looks as if we're going to have fewer sunspots. That's good to know. We might want to consider it as we decide how solve some of the serious problems we face as a country. In fact, I think it will be quite handy.

Stay tuned.