One Solar Week The Sun was sporting several sunspot groups over an eight-day period (Mar. 4-11, 2011) as seen in visible light by our HMI instrument. Watch how the sunspot groups are not entirely stationary: they do shift and change somewhat over time. The Sun is gradually starting to emerge from an over two-year period of being relatively quiet with few sunspots and little solar activity. Note that the Moon briefly eclipses an edge of the Sun early in the clip due to the position of the SDO spacecraft.