The forward-facing camera is located in the right wing pylon. It is a Point Grey Research Hi-Res Flea - Color, 1024x768 resolution. The Navitar DO-412 lens has a focal length of 4 mm. The field of view is about 62 x 48 degrees with some barrel distortion.

Images were acquired once per second and stored as JPEG-compressed files, roughly 50 kB each. No processing of the images was performed beyond converting the raw pixel signal into a 24 bit color image. Applying a sharpening filter as is ordinarily done by consumer digital cameras will considerably improve the appearance. The UTC date and time are encoded in the filename as YYMMDD-HHMMSS.jpg. These are the archived images.

For the preliminary MPEG-4 movies each image was processed with the linux ImageMagick toolkit. The image was first cropped to 512x384 pixels. Sharpening was then performed [SHARPEN(0.0x1.0)]. Each image was then annotated in the lower left with the time the image was recorded. These 1-second annotated images were compiled into a video stream running at 15 frames/s, 1000 k bps data rate using the MPEG-4/h.264 (AKA "MPEG-4 Part 10" and "AVC") codec.

The movies can be played by Quicktime 7 or later (Mac and Windows), xine (linux) and mplayer (multiplatform, not tested).

Flight comments:
RF06: Camera ceased recording images about 20 minutes after takeoff.
RF07: Camera was not working until the flight was nearly over.
RF09: Camera was not operating.

S. Beaton
NCAR/RAF
2009-02-10