Discussion questions for The Solar Close-Up

1. What would happen to life on the Earth if the Earth had no magnetic field?

2. When designing a solar telescope, tradeoffs must be made between image size, field-of-view, and image cadence. For example, a telescope which takes very large pictures will have to take the pictures very slowly. What other design tradeoffs can you think of? How would you make these tradeoffs to observe solar flares? CME's? The quiet Sun?

3. An image transmitted from a spacecraft is broken down into 1's and 0's (bits) for transmission, usually with 8, 12 or 16 bits to describe each picture element or "pixel". A typical image will have one million pixels, requiring 16 million bits. How many bits of information do you think it takes to describe a human being in strands of DNA?

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