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Name: Steve
Status: educator
Age: 40s
Location: N/A
Country: N/A
Date: 3/7/2003
Question:
I would really like to use an inquiry based laboratory for optics beginning with the discovery of the human eye. In other words, do you know of a laboratory that would ask students to measure the angular resolution of the human eye in arc minutes?

Replies:
No, but this is something you can do yourself. Draw zebra stripes on a piece of paper, and move it back away from the student. The sharp contrast between black and white will slowly fade to just a more greyish total. Its subjective of course, but anything with people is. If this were done by a tv camera and a machine then you could have a graph. This "modulation transfer function" is one characteristic of a lens system, one often sees listings for how many "lines per mm" a camera lens can resolve.

Steve Ross


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