Sunspots are a phenomenon easily observed with a basic telescope and a sheet of paper.
http://www.astrosociety.org/education/publications/tnl/05/stars2.htmlI have personally done this to satisfy my own interests, recorded the results, and found sunspots to appear, grow or shrink in size, move, and dissapear over a period of time.
Solar flares - If the sun is a spotlight, how do you account for this flare activity? I won't refer to any of the hundreds satalite observations or disruptions of long-range communications. How about this...
The most powerful flare of the last 500 years was the first flare to be observed, and occurred in September 1859: it was reported by British astronomer Richard Carrington and left a trace in Greenland ice in the form of nitrates and beryllium-10, which allow its strength to be measured today (New Scientist, 2005).
And...
Richard Christopher Carrington (26 May 1826 – 27 November 1875) was an English amateur astronomer whose 1859 astronomical observations first corroborated the existence of solar flares as well as their electrical influence upon the Earth and its aurorae; and whose 1863 records of sunspot observations demonstrated differential rotation in the Sun.
Seems like the sun is a spherical non-spotlight.