Did I photograph some sunspots?

I was editing a timelapse I did of a sunset this summer with my Pentax K70, using 18-270mm lens at full zoom, using raw photos. At first I thought I had a speck on the lens when I saw a spot on the left side about the middle, then I noticed it stayed on the sun as it went down. Then I noticed two smaller spots that also travelled with it closer to the middle, and were only visible when the sun went behind a thin haze of smoke that was on the horizon that evening.

Are sun spots tracked at all and do they have a duration long enough that solar observers can look for them?

The images were taken on July 6, 2023 around 10pm.

Yes, those are sun spots. You can probably find some pics of them in the SOHO Observatory archive for that date (yes they are catalogued and tracked): https://soho.nascom.nasa.gov/

Thanks for the reply, I was mistaken the images I took were on the 8th July, and the visible spots in my image match up more or less with this archived image from the site you linked:


Although the larger spot on the left is lower than in my images, which I am assuming is due to the time of day it was taken and/or the latitudes they were taken from (I am at the 54th parallel)

A really good test is to take a picture in a few days, and see of the spots have moved. Then you know they are on the sun and not your optics.

We are building towards the maximum of Cycle 25, which is good, although 25 seems to be a fairly quiet cycle.

Glenstr said:

the latitudes they were taken from

SOHO is 1.5 million kilometers away from Earth.

BoB

rbelli1 said:

SOHO is 1.5 million kilometers away from Earth.

BoB

he was referring to his latitude of 54 deg

It's the angle of perpendicular at sunset at that latitude plus (or potentially minus) the relevant vector of the tilt of the Earth. There would be the inclination of the earth's orbit to the rotational axis of The Sun to take into account as I believe the SOHO pictures are published so that vertical is aligned with The Sun's axis of rotation.