Browsing around the net I found these amazing photos of the surface of the sun in 3D. They are way cool although as cool as they are they make me think of the sun as something much less stable and therefore scarier than before. Like this picture! Those black areas are larger than the moon!
I found that site through the Astronomy Picture of the Day site. Which also lead me to this amazing picture of an airplane just as it breaks the sound barrier. And that led me to this page that shows why there is a sonic boom. Set the speed to 0.5 or 2.0 and click reset then start and see how the sounds from the airplane all arrive at different times to your ear but try it again 1.0 when the airplane is going exactly the speed of sound and see that all the sound arrives at the same time.
Gregg … Jon has studied sun spots and wanted me to send this link of statistics should you be interested in checking out the page. By the way, his read is a cooling trend for our globe.
http://www.dxlc.com/solar/cyclcomp.html
Check out “wolf numbers.”
It’s scarier to see the sun complete with huge flares, etc, such as here: http://discovery.nasa.gov/images/sun.jpe
There are even some short movies out there showing the kind of bursts and explosions that emanate from the sun all the time.