In a method and an apparatus for acquiring magnetic resonance data, a region of a subject is exposed to a spin echo magnetic resonance pulse sequence that includes a refocusing radio-frequency pulse flip angle evolution that causes magnetic resonance signals to be emitted from the region with a signal evolution following each excitation radio-frequency pulse. The signal evolution is sampled to extract two or more sets of sampled data therefrom respectively with different contrast weightings of tissues in the region. The multiple sets of sampled data are made available as respective outputs in a form allowing multiple different images of the region to be generated therefrom, respectively with said different contrast weightings. For example, a spin density-weighted image and a T2-weighted image, or a T2-weighted image and a heavily T2-weighted image, thus can be generated by sampling from the same variable-flip-angle echo train.