The NSF/NCAR GV HIAPER flew forward, left, right, and downward facing digital cameras for in-flight image capture.

The forward-looking camera is an Allied Vision Alvium G1-240 (AVT-UA-18175) w/ Sony IMX392 - color, 1936x1216 resolution. The lens is an Allied Vision (AVT-UA-12342) 6mm lens F1.8. This camera is located in the cockpit.

The images were acquired once per second and stored as JPEG-compressed files. No image processing was performed beyond converting the raw pixel data from the color cameras to 24 bit/pixel 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.

H.264 compressed, half-resolution movies (.mp4) 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)]. Each image was then annotated in the lower left with the time the image was recorded and in the upper right with the pointing. Finally, the images were combined into a single block.

The movies are playable with Quicktime, Windows media player from Windows 7, mplayer, VLC, and others.