AMATEUR ASTRONOMERS FILLING IN FOR SDO: Images from NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) are temporarily unavailable as technicians rush to repair a broken fiber optic cable linking SDO's White Sands ground station to Stanford University. This is a major outage.

Meanwhile, amateur astronomers are photographing the sun and seeing several new sunspots. Here is a montage from Pepe Manteca of Barcelona, Spain:

https://imgur.com/r7X3x3p

"This morning I was shooting AR3068, but it looked very different compared to the latest SDO images," says Manteca. "Then I read on spaceweather that there is a breakdown with the data from SDO, and I saw in my telescope that there are three new sunspots."

These sunspots did not exist (or were invisible) when SDO's cable broke on August 3rd, highlighting the importance of continued monitoring by amateur astronomers.

[link to www.spaceweather.com (secure)]