While you can turn to a number of specialized applications if you wish to analyze spatial data stored in raster files, a complex tool is not always suitable for performing simple observations.

Spatial Aspect Viewer is a lightweight program specially designed for observation of spatial raster data, and Digital Elevation Models in particular. It supports multiple popular raster formats, and it allows you to customize various rendering parameters, as well as print or export the modified maps.

The application can read spatial data from multiple raster file formats, including DEM, BIL, IMG, SRTM, HGT.BIN, HGT.ZIP and DDF. It supports the Cylindrical and Polar Stereographic projections for terrestrial planets and the Moon, as well as Universal Transverse Mercator and Interrupted Good Homolosine for Earth.

Thanks to the application’s small file size, you can install it in no time at all, and no advanced configurations need to be performed once the initial setup procedure has been completed.

Once a data file has been imported, you can take advantage of the intuitive navigation tools to find what you are looking for. It is also possible to set up regions of interest that can then be accessed with just a couple of mouse clicks.

The Legend Manager enables you to customize the color scale used to display various elevations, and several shading parameters can also be fine-tuned.

Finally, the data can be saved as a DEM or BIL file with headers, and the rendered map can be printed or exported to a PNG image file.

Spatial Aspect Viewer features a minimalistic UI, which certainly contributes to the application’s reduced memory and CPU usage. However, the interface is somewhat outdated, a factor that potential users should take into consideration.

Overall, Spatial Aspect Viewer is a lightweight, easy-to-use observation tool that enables you to open and analyze spatial data stored in raster files. It offers a fair number of useful features, but it is drawn back by its outdated interface.

Spatial Aspect Viewer is part of these download collections: GIS Tools