What is the meaning of View and Sun Azimuth Grid in sentinel2?

Optical Toolbox
#1

Hi there,
When I open the Bands folder of a L1C Sentinel 2 image in SNAP, I see two folders named “sun” and “view”.
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Each one include Azimuth and Zenith angle.
I have two questions:
1- Why does the layer of each file in the folders have only 21 rows and 21 columns? it has much less pixels than the Bands have.

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2- Why are there Azimuth and Zenith file for each band? Shouldn’t they all be equivalent?

#2

Hi,

they have less pixels because the spatial resolution is different. For the angles, it is 5000 m while in the bands the spatial resolution is 10/20/60m.

Due to the geometry of the sensor, the viewing angles are slightly different for each band. You can find more info about the sensor on the internet, see for example:

https://earth.esa.int/web/sentinel/technical-guides/sentinel-2-msi/msi-instrument

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