file formats

Yes, earth and sun are ephemeris files, describing the motion of the sun and earth.

They are plain ASCII files. After the 1st header line there are 10 columns, giving the time (GPS seconds IIRC), 3 Cartesian cords for the position (in units of sec), 3 for velocity (sec/sec) and 3 for acceleration (1/sec). “sec� here means “light-sec� – light travel time from the Solar System Barycenter to the Earth or Sun, respectively.

The other files h1_* and l1_* contain pre-processed data from the detectors in a proprietary binary format, basically some frequency bins of the SFTs of several time stretches of detector data. H1 is data from Hanford, L1 from Livingston. The number in the filename is the base frequency of the data in the file, i.e. the frequency (in Hz) the lowest bins in a file correspond to.

BM