Keep in mind that the instrument developers who built the two imagers onboard have spent the last ~10 years of their life working largely on this project. For many of them, it will be the crowning achievement of their career. The results are likely to reshape the discipline due to the increase in spatial and (especially!) temporal resolution.
To get this thing to work, they had to overcome a lot of technical obstacles, including thermal stability of the focal plane and optics (it's a high-resolution telescope that mostly sits in the sun, but goes into Earth's shadow regularly, altering lengths of optical paths), and bandwidth issues (a set of 16-bit 4096x4096 images every ~10 seconds).
Finally, and this is not made clear in the press materials, they're exploiting some neat spectral effects to get unusual "images": spatially-resolved velocity (thru Doppler shifting of spectral lines) and spatially-resolved magnetic field (thru the Zeeman effect). That is, an image of local magnetic field. Those calibrated images are a main driver of the science -- although the flare pictures are cool.
Putting it all together is an impressive technical feat.
To get this thing to work, they had to overcome a lot of technical obstacles, including thermal stability of the focal plane and optics (it's a high-resolution telescope that mostly sits in the sun, but goes into Earth's shadow regularly, altering lengths of optical paths), and bandwidth issues (a set of 16-bit 4096x4096 images every ~10 seconds).
Finally, and this is not made clear in the press materials, they're exploiting some neat spectral effects to get unusual "images": spatially-resolved velocity (thru Doppler shifting of spectral lines) and spatially-resolved magnetic field (thru the Zeeman effect). That is, an image of local magnetic field. Those calibrated images are a main driver of the science -- although the flare pictures are cool.
Putting it all together is an impressive technical feat.