Beginning the first week in January, sunspot region 1944 produced one X-class flare and seven M-class flares. It is now determined region 1944 was the largest sunspot group of Cycle 24. We have to go back to July 2004 (previous Cycle 23) to find a significantly bigger group which was sunspot region 0652.
It was not an easy task to determine the measurements of region 1944 to be compared to previous largest events. The Sun being a round sphere, a sunspot near the limb looks a lot smaller than an equally sized sunspot near the disk's center. Hence, small deviations in the measurements may result in a very different outcome for the sunspot area.
For all these reasons, the area data can differ substantially from one source to the other. Applying this consistently on SDO/HMI imagery, it turns out that the maximum area for NOAA 1944 (Jan. 7th 2014) seems to be slightly larger than that of the previous runner-ups…sunspot region 1339 which occurred on Nov. 3rd 2011 and region 1520 occurring July 10th 2012 showing a 1% to 4% increase over the latter.
