Top panel: ToV 2004 light curve (black dashed line) for the 3D RHD simulation of the Sun (Fig. 5) compared to the photometric observations (red dots with error bars, Schneider et al. 2006) taken with ACRIM 3 mounted on ACRIMSAT. The observations have been normalized to 1, dividing the original data (Fig. 3 of Schneider et al. 2006) by 1365.88 W/m². The light curve has been averaged (with the green shade denoting highest and lowest values) over 50 different synthetic solar-disk images to account for granulation changes with respect to time. Bottom panel: same as above, but for one particular realization among the 50 synthetic solar-disk images.