GDAL is a library that provides a common API for multiple formats of hyperspectral and geospatial image data.

GDAL can be installed using PyPI with easy_install gdal, but that only installs the python modules. It expects the DLLs to be installed separately. The GDAL instructions say to put the DLLs and binaries anywhere and modify the system path. Rather than do that, I copied the DLLs to the C:/Python25/Lib/site-packages/GDAL-1.5.0-py2.5-win32.egg/osgeo directory. The python loader picks up the DLLs in that directory without fussing about with the system paths.