New Horizons LORRI image aligner

This is a script which takes images from New Horizon's LORRI camera, and aligns them using background stars. With these aligned images a flyby animation can be produced:

And here's a blog post where I explain how I did it.

A smaller animation can be generated with:

./lorri-align.py --from '2015-04-12 03:27:00' --to '2015-04-18 08:57:30' \
    --black-cutoff 10 --crop 323,586,71,87
convert -delay 5 data/images/stacked/*.png anim_small.gif

Note -u and -d should be passed on the initial invocation in order to grab the relevant metadata and imagery from the John Hopkins LORRI website. A generous time.sleep is inserted between HTTP requests to avoid DoS'ing the website, but please be considerate when running with -d and -u!

With this in mind, the full animation can be generated by using --to '2015-07-09 22:37:05' and --crop 555,343,631,1035, however, downloading the data will take a while!

If the metadata becomes corrupted for whatever reason deleting data/images/input/metadata.json and re-running with -u should restore the metadata. Similarly any corrupt images can be deleted from data/images/input/. They will be restored the next time the script needs them.