During IDEAS-4-GV, the HIAPER flew a forward and a right-facing digital camera for in-flight image capture. The forward camera is a Point Grey Research Hi-Res Flea - Color, 1024x768 resolution. The Navitar DO-412 lens has a focal length of 4 mm and the field of view is about 62 x 48 degrees with some barrel distortion. This camera is located on the right wing pylon. The right-facing camera is a Point Grey Research Flea 3 (FL3-FW-14S3C-C) - Color, 1280 x 960 resolution equipped with an Edmund Optics 6mm lens (#67-709). The field of view is 68 x 51 degrees with approximately 6% barrel distortion. This camera was looking out a right-side cabin window, tipped slightly down and aft from perpendicular to the fuselage Images were acquired once per second and stored as JPEG-compressed files, roughly 100 kB each. No image processing was performed beyond converting the raw pixel data to 24 bit color images. 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. Preliminary H.264 compressed, half-resolution movies (.mov) were created. Each 1-second image was processed with the linux ImageMagick toolkit. The image was first cropped to 512x384 pixels. Sharpening was then performed [SHARPEN(0.0x1.0)]

These 1-second annotated images were compiled into a video stream running at 15 frames/s, 1500 kbps data rate. The movies are playable with Quicktime, WIndows Media Player, mplayer, VLC, and others. No imagery was recorded during the RF01 flight.