A collaborative community for planetary sciences.

The JPEG2000 image file format is pretty darn cool, however, there are a dearth of good bits of Open Source software for dealing with them. The HiRISE team distributes the IAS Viewer to allow you to browse the HiRISE JP2 files on their JPIP server, or you can also use it to view JP2 files that you have downloaded. A colleague of mine let me know about the JHelioviewer software that is an Open source JPEG2000 viewer capable of loading local JP2s and reading from JPIP servers. It is developed by the solar physics community (they have big pictures of the Sun), and many of its user aide features are geared towards the solar physics community (and their need for time-domain movie-like data). However, it works just fine for HiRISE images, and provides an Open Source alternative to the IAS Viewer.