When it comes to active regions (AR) on the Sun, this one is big...how big? By my estimation, AR11944 is larger than Jupiter. Click on the SDO image and scale at left to enlarge, and remember that the sunspots are contained within a larger region of magnetic activity.
This region made it's way around the Sun's eastern limb on New Years Day, and I expect that we will be able to observe this region and it's accompanying spots for approximately two weeks as it transits (the Sun rotates from east to west with a rotational period of approximately 25 days at the equator). Below are two images from this morning, taken through my 90mm Stellarvue triplet and Lunt Solar Systems Herschel Prism. They represent stacks of 750 frames (out of 3000) in average seeing captured with an ASI120MC camera. This region is on the southeast limb of the Sun, but I liked the composition better as presented-
Below is a second image of the region, taken with the addition of a 2x Barlow lens- and I am not sure why, but blogger seems to compress images and much of the solar granulation is blurred, particularly above the spots...but at least the spots survived the blog platform!
If you have a solar telescope, this is one region worth taking a gander at...and, I suspect this region is large enough to be seen naked eye with the appropriate solar filter to protect one's eyes.
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