Archive for the 'Record images' category

Always ready to produce enormous images, Scott Howard delivers a nice night view of the Chicago skyline. Zoom as much as you’ll want!

Source (from Belgium): Karakartal3.

1000 millions of pixels, that was good enoug. 1000 billions of pixels is better! But it’s really a technical challenge. Before we can see the first 1 Tera-pixel digital photo camera (don’t wait for it), Aperio defined an extension to the TIFF image format allowing to create such a large image.

Even better, they demonstrated the capacity with a composite 1 Tera-pixel image visible on their web site. This is a stitching of 255 pathology slides of breast tissue (not the most exciting photo, but…).

Source: CNet.

Essentially, Wallhogs is accepting your picture files to prepare special prints of large size:

• Decals, that would be nice to stick on a wall or on your fridge
• Posters (you know that don’t you?)
• Canvas prints, that would mimic a canvas paint

Did you think that you needed a little more space to store the RAW digital files of your digital camera? Think again. Photographer Gérard Maynard and French panorama software company Kolor created a panoramic digital photograph of no less that 13 Giga-bytes. 2045 photos stitched together using Kolor’s AutoPano Pro software. Gérard Maynard used a Nikon D200 with a 300mm lens and the software operation took several days to finish.

The full image of the Harlem quarter of New York City is at harlem-13-gigapixels.com.

Source: PhotographyBlog.

The Hubble space telescope just went through its 17th birthday. Unfortunately, its future seems to be pretty much compromised since the Moon and Mars ambitions of the President of the United States of America forced NASA to reduce drastically the number of space shuttle missions: There will probably never be any other repair mission to Hubble and the space telescope will soon die of old age.

For the time being, NASA and ESA take time to celebrate the event with a huge panoramic image (29,566 x 14,321 pixels) Carina nebula, a space region of intense star creation.

Some assemble really big images. Some do it professionally, like NASA.

They took a huge number of satellite images and made a 0.5 giga-pixel photo of the Earth (up to 21600×21600), known as the Visible Earth.

Microsoft Live Maps is a satellite mapping application in direct competition with Google Maps and a few others. Microsoft just added a large amount of photo images taken from planes. It produces 3.8 tera-bytes of additional data. But this mostly means more details and some of the images are taken at a slightly slanted angle that helps you recognize the buildings, for example.

When you start fighting for the highest possible resolution in digital cameras, you usually count in mega-pixels. METIS Systems goes further: 4 giga-pixels in a single camera. The Digital Macro Camera 1015/C [PDF] is able to photograph 12 square meters at non-interpolated 254 ppi. (100 pixel per square millimeter).

This is a tool to make photographic reproductions of the highest possible quality and, contrary to what has been done by others, this is not a technique to stitch hundreds of images but a dynamic scanning directly included in the camera.

Italy seems to be the right place to do high-definition images these days.

When you look into the largest images accessible from the Internet, you MUST check Google maps and Google Earth (the application that allows you to navigate on the surface of the Earth globe from your desktop with the satellite images collected by Digital Globe and Google).

From its inception, Google Earth provided images of the Earth globe at a resolution of 15m/pixel (each pixel is a square of 15 meter by 15 meter). But from 23rd of March 2006, 20% of the emerged land mass (about 1/3 of the world population) is now covered by exclusive photos in the amazing résolution of 70cm/p (sometimes even down to 10cm/p, enough to recognize the plane model on an airport and to distinguish people in a house garden).

If we only keep the basic resolution, the Google Earth image amounts already to 2,111 giga-pixels. Impressive, but this is not all. If we include the high-resolution zones (let’s forget about the isolated 10cm/p zones), we must conclude that the Google Earth image is:

• 20% of land mass at 0.7m/p: 56,616 giga-pixels
• All the rest at 15m/p: 1,988 giga-pixels

A stagegring total of 58,604 giga-pixels! 58 T-pixel! We’re just switching to a different scale.

It will be difficult to make it bigger but Google is already working at it since the systematic movie to 0.7m/p for continental masses would lead to about 5 times this volume, and surfaces covered at 0.1m/p will simply blow the total up when it is no longer applied to isolated test examples (like the current example in part of Las Vegas city).

Let’s be clear and simple, the main limit will soon be (for Google): How to keep such a big amount of data accessible knowing that there is a constraint on access times (tens of thousands of simultaneous accesses from all over the world cannot be served by a mere big disk drive on the corner of a desk and keeping it up-to-date is not only a matter of cut’n paste anymore).

This is an art project using the collaborative Internet to create one of the largest images in the world.

MillionMasterPiece.com wants to create an historic art master piece by collating one million small 160×160 images, leading to more than 25 giga-pixels of contemporary art.

You can join for free or, even better, you can donate a small sum of money to the project. It will be used to support one of the NGOs associated to the web site (Oxfam, Save the children, World cancer research fund, ActionAid, WWF). After joining, you will be able to draw your own picture.

Since the WWF is one of the sponsors, I personally suggest that animal photographers should participate as photography artists. But, as far as I know, it is not possible to publish one of your photos.

Once complete, the picture will be printed on a giant 80m canvas and unveiled in London as a symbol of global unity and a celebration of 21st century global culture and society.

Io, a Jupiter satellite, has long been the only place -out of good old Earth- where presently active volcanoes could be observed presently. It fascinated me even when the satellite was joined by other bodies in the Solar system.

Today NASA confirms us that Io is still the best place where you should go and spend your vacations if you want to go volcano-watching (or volcano-photographing) on live ones. And you will see pretty impressive ones, too.

The most recent tourist there returned a really amazing image.

LORRI (Long Range Reconnaissance Imager) is an on-board photo camera installed in the New Horizons mission en route for Pluto that just cruised past Jupiter. It took advantage of the short time there to snapshot a few landscape photos. On one of them, Io shows nothing less than three volcanos simultaneously active. The one seen at the top (near the pole) blows a plume culminating at an altitude of about 180 miles.

However, be sure to check with your travel agent, the cost of the missiontravel may be counted in millions of dollars. And tell your boss that you will be out of the office for a few years rather than the usual one week leave for a more common tropical island vacations on Earth.

The United States Geological Survey (USGS) Earth Explorer v4.5, is providing a tremendous amount of details with the stated 1m/pixel in the United States (but only 20m/pixel outside of the US).

Since the Earth surface is about 510,065,600,000,000 square meters (according to Wikipedia), this leads to a total of around 1,188 giga-pixel world image (plus some more details in the US which is 400 times more precise).

There is a race with competing Google Earth and others to get the most details, and this will ead to ever increasing sizes.

In the context of a campaign to protect whales from intense hunting and killing all over the world, the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society created a gigantic image representing a life-sized blue whale that you can check in details from your computer.

A good half giga-pixel of blue whale – to observe with a magnification glass.

Do not forget that the blue whale is the largest mammal on Earth today and they are really endangered.

Source: WDSC : Last chance to see a life size blue whale!

This is the promise of the Press Release by BetterLight. Their new Super10K-HSâ„¢ scanning back is a hell of a big data cruncher producing 416 MP per scan.

A nice image of an marvellous archeological site (the Machu Pichu in Peru) still full of the echoes of a glorious past, Inca history. Thanks to Scott Howard, you can visit this billion and a half pixels assembled from 400 individual images.

Today, this is not a record image that we show, but the publication of a scientific paper about the design of an camera for astronomy to be installed in a giant telescope (8.4m), probably in Chile.

The 3.2 giga-pixel LSST camera will produce approximately half a petabyte of archive images every month. These data need to be reduced in under a minute to produce real-time transient alerts, and then added to the cumulative catalog for further analysis. The catalog is expected to grow about three hundred terabytes per year. The data volume, the real-time transient alerting requirements of the LSST, and its spatio-temporal aspects require innovative techniques to build an efficient data access system at reasonable cost. As currently envisioned, the system will rely on a database for catalogs and metadata. Several database systems are being evaluated to understand how they perform at these data rates, data volumes, and access patterns. This paper describes the LSST requirements, the challenges they impose, the data access philosophy, results to date from evaluating available database technologies against LSST requirements, and the proposed database architecture to meet the data challenges.

To be published in SPIE.

The web site for the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST).

If you ever dreamed of printing images in much larger size than what your personal printer allows (let’s say 3′ by 6′), you have either to buy a very expensive printer or use a very expensive photo printing service. You see the common words here: very expensive.

The Rasterbator creates huge, rasterized images from any picture. Upload an image, print the resulting multi-page pdf file and assemble the pages into extremely cool-looking poster up to 20 meters in size.

The quality is only limited by your ability to correctly assemble the pages.

Nota bene: It’s much better if your printer uses all the surface of the paper and does not leave a white border.