What is "opticks"

n. (obsolete form of optics English)

Opticks is a book by English natural philosopher Isaac Newton that was published in English in 1704. (A scholarly Latin translation appeared in 1706.) The book analyzes the fundamental nature of light by means of the refraction of light with prisms and lenses, the diffraction of light by closely spaced sheets of glass, and the behaviour of color mixtures with spectral lights or pigment powders. It is considered one of the great works of science in history. Opticks was Newton's second major book on physical science. Newton's name did not appear on the title page of the first edition of Opticks.

Opticks is a remote sensing application that supports imagery, video (motion imagery), Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR), multi-spectral, hyper-spectral, and other types of remote sensing data. Opticks supports processing remote sensing video in the same manner as it supports imagery, which differentiates it from other remote sensing applications. Opticks was initially developed by Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. and other organizations for the United States Intelligence Community. Ball Aerospace open sourced Opticks hoping to increase the demand for remote sensing data and broaden the features available in existing remote sensing software. The Opticks software and its extensions are developed by over twenty different organizations, and over two hundred users are registered users at http://opticks.org. Future planned enhancements include adding the ability to ingest and visualize lidar data, as well as a three-dimensional (3-D) visualization capability.

Opticks can also be used as a remote sensing software development framework. Developers can extend Opticks functionality using its plug-in architecture and public application programming interface (API). Opticks is open source, licensed under GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) 2.1. Opticks was brought into the open source community in Dec 2007 and has a large developer community. For more information, see the history of Opticks.