Have you spotted the sun lately? No, I don't mean a naked eye glance up to our blinding friend. I mean, have you recently seen a satellite image of our sun or have you seen it through a filtered telescope? If so, you'll have noticed something. Actually you will have noticed a lack of something. It seems the sun has lost its spots.

Go to the website for the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, SOHO. (It is at http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/) There you will see for yourself one cleaned-up, near-pristine sun. It's like someone took spot remover to it and wiped away any imperfections. The sunspots are all gone!

Where did they go?

Right now we are in the middle of an expected quiet period for our star. The sun actually cycles through periods of sunspotting. It takes about eleven years to go through the cycle from lots of spots to nearly none and back to heavy. The last spotty period, also know as Solar Max, was back in 2002. Back then the sun was speckled like a leopard.

Since then the spots have gradually diminished to a point where there are essentially none today. They will return, though. The next Solar Max is expected about 2012.

But what are the sunspots and why do they come and go? It has to do with magnetic fields.

Planet Earth has a magnetic field that is relatively nice and stable and, like a giant protective bubble, diverts incoming nasty solar particles around us. It really is a wonderful effect of our planet's interior makeup.

The sun has a magnetic field, as well, a monstrous one. But it has this spinning problem. Earth spins at the same rate everywhere. Whether one is in northern Alaska or on the equator, it takes 24 hours to make one trip around.

On the sun, it ain't so. The equator of the sun spins around faster then the poles do. It can do that because it is not a solid.

But - long story short - this means the sun can actually wrap itself up in its own magnetic field. It is not unlike those rhythmic gymnasts who, if they spin fast enough, can get wrapped up in their flowing ribbon thingies.

These wrapped up magnetic field lines can squirm around like giant magnetic worms along the sun's surface. When one kinks, like when one kinks a water hose, the magnetic kink can break through the surface of the sun.

Where this happens, the sun's heat has a tough time breaking out of the sun and it is cooler there. We see these cooler areas as sunspots.

A lot of sunspots means the sun is pretty active; it is a jumbling, living, energetic surface full of energy and tangled magnetic lines and spots and prominences and flares and coronal mass ejections. Oh my!

What a mess!

But eventually it reorders itself. The sunspots disappear. Things quiet down. The sun takes a breath before the next act. We are there now, at the sun's intermission.

What does the next Solar Max hold? It's coming, there is no getting around that. But will it be a milder one as some scientists predict, or will it be up to 40% worse than the last as some computer models are showing us?

Will extra heavy activity have a minimal effect on earth's climate, or will it trigger something more profound, especially since the climate situation is getting more precarious all the time?

One way or another, for the die-hard astro fans out there, watch the sun over the next 5 years and see the slow return of the spots for yourself. But use a filter!