Sunspots AR2936, AR2937 and friends, the first being amongst the largest of young solar cycle 25 and which hurled a coronal mass ejection towards Earth in the early hours of January 30th, bound to reach us February 1st or 2nd.
AR2936 has multiple dark cores larger than Earth, and the entire group stretches more than 100,000 km across the surface of the sun. That’s about 8 Earths one next to each other, or a little less than a quarter of the way to the Moon (which is 30 earths away, roughly).
Beautiful footage from SOHO showing the CME that is expected spark auroras at mid-Northern latitudes:
Everything Geek 