What a nice article, that touches on a couple of issues in solar physics: o Because you have a big object, and a lot of photons, it's possible for amateur or

What a nice article, that touches on a couple of issues in solar physics: o Because you have a big object, and a lot of photons, it's possible for amateur or less-equipped astronomers/departments to make a significant contribution. You can do a lot with a sub-1m telescope in a good location. o The solar cycle is 11 years, so in the career of a solar physicist, they might see 3 full solar cycles. You might work for a decade to get an instrument in orbit to observe, and see a solar cycle that is kind of underwhelming (like the just-ended solar cycle 24). o Given the above (time scale of instruments vs. Sun), there is a hard inter-calibration problem of critical time series like activity or irradiance. You need to keep consistent daily measurements over decadal time scales. This timebase spans the observing lifetime of telescopes, people, and even groups of people -- university groups come and go over a 30-year time span. Sunspot and active region determination is automated now, of course -- but this kind of historical record is really important. And, just because it's automated for one instrument, does not mean this carries over to the next one with different spatial resolution and spectral/temporal sampling.