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A SUNSPOT MADE IN CHINA: For a split second on Sept. 12th, the sunspot number increased by 1. The extra sunspot was made in China. \"It was the Tiangong space station,\" explains Juan Carlos Casado, who watched the winged silhouette cross the sun from his backyard in Figueres, Spain:
China has been building Tiangong since its first core module was launched in April 2021. The growing station has more than doubled in size in the past year. With solar arrays, a robotic arm, multiple modules, and two spacecraft (Tianzhou 4 and Shenzhou 14) waiting at docking ports, Tiangong is starting to look a lot like the ISS. The ISS is still much larger, but China is catching up.
When it is completed in December 2023, Tiangong with be a Mir-class facility massing nearly 70 tons with living space for as many as 7 astronauts and even a Hubble-class telescope to view the cosmos.
Meanwhile, it\'s an awesome sunspot. \"Tiangong is so large I had no trouble resolving it using a small telescope (15 cm aperture),\" says Casado. \"It was in front of the sun for only 0.6 seconds. My conventional mirrorless camera shooting in burst mode (10 images per second) caught it six times.\"
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d9/Tiangong_Space_Station_Rendering_2022.07.jpg/300px-Tiangong_Space_Station_Rendering_2022.07.jpg
https://spaceweather.com/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiangong_space_station
China has been building Tiangong since its first core module was launched in April 2021. The growing station has more than doubled in size in the past year. With solar arrays, a robotic arm, multiple modules, and two spacecraft (Tianzhou 4 and Shenzhou 14) waiting at docking ports, Tiangong is starting to look a lot like the ISS. The ISS is still much larger, but China is catching up.
When it is completed in December 2023, Tiangong with be a Mir-class facility massing nearly 70 tons with living space for as many as 7 astronauts and even a Hubble-class telescope to view the cosmos.
Meanwhile, it\'s an awesome sunspot. \"Tiangong is so large I had no trouble resolving it using a small telescope (15 cm aperture),\" says Casado. \"It was in front of the sun for only 0.6 seconds. My conventional mirrorless camera shooting in burst mode (10 images per second) caught it six times.\"
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d9/Tiangong_Space_Station_Rendering_2022.07.jpg/300px-Tiangong_Space_Station_Rendering_2022.07.jpg
https://spaceweather.com/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiangong_space_station