The CD-ROM has been formatted using the ISO9660 standard, which means that it may be read by most computers, including Macintosh, IBM PC compatibles and Unix systems.
There are essentially two components of this disc
1. "Looking Back" - an electronic book
2. Satellite image data
The Book
Looking back was originally published in 1992 to present the results of the Australian Case Study for International Space Year (1992). The case study involved the use of satellite data to detect, interpret and communicate changes in the landcover of the Australian continent that occurred between 1972 and 1992.
It was designed as a "coffee table" book to demonstrate the beauty and power of satellite images of Earth. Readers are introduced to the principles of interpreting satellite data to explore the history of what happened on the ground during the Looking Back period.
The book is now out of print, but has been revised and reformatted and is presented here in World Wide Web style - a series of linked documents which can be read with commonly available WWW browsing software, such as Microsoft Internet Explorer or Netscape Navigator. Pages have been deliberately kept small for faster access and are linked sequentially as in the original book. Most pages are linked back to the "Contents" page, which acts as a kind of home page for the book, linking to each chapter and various references. Users are encouraged to exploit their browser's facilities to help navigate through the book and view the images. Please be aware that all images are subject to copyright and cannot be reproduced without the publishers' consent.
The Data
Another result of the Australian Case Study was the production of a companion CD-ROM to Looking Back called "Auswatch". Remarkable for its time, it contained image processing software and the satellite images from the book, thus allowing the user to explore the techniques described in the book on the same data.
Most of that data has been reproduced on this CD-ROM, this time in a generic format suitable for input into many of the image processing packages now available. Image processing software has not been included.
The data are in many cases subsets (smaller portions) of the images presented in the book. This is due to a number of practical limitations in effect when the original CD-ROM was published. It is worth noting that the images are available in two formats - a data format and a graphics format. See About the data for more detail.