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 70 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 slightly sharpened [SHARPEN(0.0x1.0)] and resized to 512x384 pixels. 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 30 frames/s, 1000 kbps 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).

Comments

Flights RF03 and RF08 - RF10 ended in darkness so there are no images from the last portion of these flights. In addition, the center nightime portion of RF10 has been removed.

On at least one flight the camera seems to quite functioning on each dip, possibly due to condensation in the pylon.

RF04 - About 1.75 hours were lost at the beginning (20:05:15 - 21:47:59).

RF08 - About 2.5 hours were lost near the beginning (23:32:56 - 02:07:55).

TF02 - The camera was failing because water had collected in it. Many images have bad color and large portions of the flight are missing entirely.

S. Beaton
NCAR/RAF
2009-12-01