Giga is the new Mega

And this shit is mega cool. Gigapixel photography is the art/science (like interpolation – I hate John Gatta) of taking very high resolution images. I’ll give a quick overview for the less geeky amongst us. A digital image is composed of pixels – think of the squares on graph paper – that each have a different color value assigned to them. An image’s resolution then is the number of pixels in the image. Resolution is expressed in two primary ways – either as the width and height of the image in pixels (for example, 1,600 x 1,200) or as a single number that refers to the width and height multiplied together (i.e. the actual total number of pixels). So the above dimensions would refer to an image that contains 1,920,000 pixels, or 1.9 million pixels, which is generally expressed (after a bit of rounding) as 2 megapixels.

It takes approximately one billion pixels, then, to make one gigapixel. Think of taking hundreds of individual pictures with your five megapixel digital camera and then stiching them all together to form one, gigantic coherent image. That’s exactly what this guy did a few years ago to make what he believed to be the first non-scientific, privately created gigapixel image. Of course the government has been taking gigapixel images for years – think satellites and spy-planes -- and recently individuals have begun using that technology to create a flood of gigapixel imagery. People have even developed tools to view these huge images on the web. Check out the awesome panning/zooming interface of this 2.5 gigapixel image – apparently the largest digital panoramic photo in the world.