ROCHESTER, N.Y. (WROC) - Every 11 years the sun goes through a natural uptick in activity as its magnetic poles, like those that we have on earth at the north and south poles, flip in orientation. It’s right in the middle of this cycle that the sun begins to produce an excess of sunspots, which can lead to what are called solar flares. "It's in the middle of that reversal process where the magnetic field lines get distorted andstressed and that they punch up to the center to some, resulting in the visible piece of that it's the sunspot sometimes 10 to 15 times the size of the earth," said Bill Murtagh, the program coordinator at the NOAA Space Weather Predication Center. In October, it was announced officially that we had entered the solar maximum, or the period of highest activity on the sun for solar cycle 25. "There's different ways we can determine the solar maximum but essentially it's the number of sunspots and we're in that period now when we're seeing the most sunspots," said Murtagh. "So essentially, it's a three or three- or four-year period of sunspot activities our sunspot man our solar maximum." Just like with our weather here on earth, there are positives and negatives that come with this time of increased activity on the sun. "If you're chasing aurora and want to see aurora is good news The consequences on some of our technologies It's not so good news because it can have some significant impacts on those technologies," Murtagh said. That includes things like potential damage to satellites which are less protected by earthsmagnetic field in their orbit, or even potential impacts to the power grid. One of the mostcommon impacts though can be to GPS like we saw this past may during a top of the scale G5 solar storm. "Precision agriculture is a good example because these folks, it's a multi-billion dollar industry in the United States today. These folks are using GPS for all sorts of activities for high precision planting of seeds, irrigation, fertilizing, many different activities," said Murtagh. "Economists from Kansas State University just released a report a few weeks ago indicating the impact of the space, that space weather event on precision ag on that day was about half a billion dollars." As our reliance on technology grows, understanding how these cycles work and being able to predict how active they are becomes all the more critical. But there is a ways to go, as there is still much that we have yet to understand about the sun. "If you look at the maximum right now, it's a fair, quite a bit bigger than it was predicted, but it's still just about on average on previous cycles, maybe a little below average. But largely it's just inability or lack of understanding of the science of the sun and that whole process of evolving, the magnetic fields rotating," Murtagh said. There have been major strides in the day-to-day predictions, with the strong G5 event in May, and the recent G4 storm in October both being predicted several days in advance. "We did a good job with the May event and even last earlier this month, we had a strong storm that was almost G5 and we predicted them both quite well," said Murtagh. As for what all this means for those hunting the aurora, at the end of the day not every solar flare that erupts from the sun will end up reaching earth or producing the northern lights. But the odds are at least in our favor through the remainder of the solar maximum.