In fact if you would have looked at the sun almost anytime in the past 6 months, you would have seen that same thing. Why is that worthy of a blog post? Because there are no spots. In fact as of right now there hasn't been a sunspot for 5 days. If you look at a plot of recent sunspot activity, like the one below, you'll see that there hasn't been much happening on the sun for a while now. It's expected that we won't have a lot of sunspots right now because we are currently in solar minimum (the bottom of the solar cycle).However, if you compare the number of sun spot-less days in the current solar minimum with the last one in 1996, it is easy to see (if you click of the graph, sorry for the small size) that something odd is going on this time around.
For some reason in this solar minimum there are far fewer sun spots than last time. In fact, this is shaping up to be the weakest solar cycle since the 1920's. What would be really exciting, however, would be if the solar cycle actually shut off for a while as it appears to have done in the late 1600s. For those of us in the solar dynamo community, it's fun to have a little bit of variety in our lives even if that variety means nothing is happening.
