The Sun's calendar
Every day since 2016, coloured by what the Sun did. Pick what to colour by, then pick a day. The quiet years at the bottom of the cycle are nearly empty. The years around the peak have something on almost every day.
Loading ten years of the Sun…
One row per year, one column per day. Click anywhere to open that day.
2026
Pick a day to see what the Sun did.
Reading it
- CMEs launched counts every coronal mass ejection NASA catalogued that day with a measured speed. A busy day near solar maximum has ten or more.
- Fastest CME uses the same colours as the live map: teal under 500 km/s, yellow from 500, orange from 1,000, red from 2,000.
- Aimed at Earth counts the CMEs whose cone covers Earth or passes within 20° of it, the same test the tracker uses. Being aimed at Earth is not the same as causing a storm. That depends on the cloud's magnetic field, which nobody can measure until it is an hour away.
- Strongest flare is the largest flare in NASA's catalogue that day. The catalogue holds every M and X flare and only some of the smaller ones, so a day with no flare here can still have had minor C-class activity.
- A white ring marks a storm that has a story and a replay.
- Days are UTC days. Arrow keys move the selected day.
Source: NASA's DONKI catalogue. Recent entries are revised as forecasters refine them, so the newest few days can change. See the same decade as a map on Where the Sun shoots, and the cycle's timing on the solar cycle page.