The world's largest digital photo

[nsane.forums]

Ever wonder what the largest digital photo ever taken was? Well it's not just a few hundred megapixels, in fact its more than a hundred GIGApixels in size, and it's a stunning sight to behold

You may think that your expensive DSLR capable of 16 megapixels can take amazing shots, and for normal shooting conditions it probably does. 4640 x 3480 certainly seems like a decent resolution, and when you zoom in the fidelity is quite sharp and can make the smallest of text readable; after all, you have captured something in this world with 16 million pixels.

However this pales in comparison to some of the largest images ever taken. I’m talking on the gigapixel scale, or 1,000,000,000 pixels: a number so large that when zoomed in to accommodate a 1080p display you will find details that are seemingly hidden in the full image. Exploring them can not only be fun but truly amazing and captivating.

Many images have been “taken” that are in the gigapixel range, most of which are a collage of many smaller images stitched together with perfect accuracy. The largest publicly available gigapixel image comes in at a whopping 152.41 gigapixels spanning 871708 x 174838 pixels. To view this image in full over standard 1080p monitors you would need 73,548 of them, and if printed it would accommodate a space larger than the walls of an aircraft hangar.

The 152 gigapixel image itself is a stunning panorama of Rio di Janeiro that features several bays, large clusters of buildings, a very long bridge, the airport and of course the famous Christ the Redeemer statue atop Corcovado peak. The fully zoomed out image can be seen above and just some of the details of the image can be seen below. It’s such a high resolution that you can make out the words on a billboard far in the distance to the right.

On the tech side of things, this amazing image was taken with a regular Canon EOS Rebel T2i capable of shooting at 18 MP equipped with a Canon Zoom EF 100-400mm lens and 2x teleconverter. The Rio-HK team that captured all 12238 images ended up with a 568 gigabyte image that took nearly 8 days to stitch together using the Autopano Giga stitching software.

If Rio di Janeiro isn’t your scene then you can check out some of the other gigapixel images that have been compiled. I really enjoy just going through and discovering the small details of the image, such as people walking on the street and planes in the distance. One of my favourite images is the 111 gigapixel stitch of Seville in Spain that has an amazing crispness and color depth to it.

If you find anything cool in any gigapixel image you might happen to be browsing, take a snapshot of it and let us know in the comments below.

View: Original Article

[Frosticles]

Sorry to steal your thunder but there is a picture that is almost twice the size of this picture on gigapan at 272.31 gigapixels.

http://www.gigapan.org/gigapans/66626

Image dimension: 887276 (w) x 306908 (h)

Date taken: May 25, 2010

Shooting time: 8:30 am – 4:30 pm

Date stitched: Sept 20, 2010

Date open to public: Dec 20, 2010

Raw image size: 1.24 TB

Raw cropped image size: 1.09 TB

Total pixels: 272.31 G

Horizontal viewing angle: 175 degree

Vertical viewing angle: 65 degree (+5 degree to -60 degree)

Total shots: 12,000 (150 columns and 80 rows)

Lens: Canon 400mm F5.6 and 2X tele-converter

Camera: Canon 7D (18M pixels per image)

Estimated overlap: 28% (set to 25%)

Average time per image: 2.4s

But even so thats pretty amazing with a regular DSLR O_O

EDIT: Found Some Ghosts XD