Software

The downloadable data consists of RAW camera files in Nikon's NEF format together with small metadata files. As part of this project the Python software AUROMAT was developed with which this data can be converted to standard CDF files and other formats. The reason for not offering pregenerated CDF files is twofold: For one, the unresampled CDF files are 10-20x bigger than the RAW files and metadata (~200-400MiB vs. 20MiB), which means that a lot of bandwidth can be saved by generating CDF files locally. Secondly, depending on one's needs different parameters can be set which influence how the CDF files are created, e.g. mapping altitude, coordinate systems, and resampling. By moving the CDF generation to the user this flexibility is easily made available*.

Apart from generating the dataset from RAW files and metadata the software also has extensive plotting capabilities. All plots and videos seen on this webpage were created with AUROMAT, albeit in quick-look quality.

AUROMAT is supported on Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows. Installation instructions can be found at https://pypi.python.org/pypi/auromat. The commands to download data and generate CDF files are listed on each sequence detail page. The source code is available at https://github.com/esa/auromat. Software documentation is hosted externally at http://pythonhosted.org/auromat/index.html.

In case there are any problems with installing or using the software please do not hesitate to contact us. Typically, we will respond within a day or two.

* If for any reason you cannot use our software but still want to work with CDF files, we can generate the CDF files for you and provide download links. Note however that such requests should only be made in exceptional cases and when absolutely necessary. Being a manual task it may take up to a week or two until the files are ready for downloading.