Panoramic photography has been around for years. Check out my website at, www.peterloud.co.uk/nodalsamurai/nodalsamuraihome.html
It has examples of panoramas from Milton Keynes & other places

It also shows you how to make a non-motorised pano-head to fit on a normal tripod for £1.50

Peter Loud, Milton Keynes, UK

Is the human eye capable of appreciating gigapixel images? because looking at an image taken with a 10 megapixel SLR camera is already razor sharp and superb quality, well according to my eyes. Would I be able to tell the difference?

Mohammed, London, UK

> Has anyone noticed in the example picture of London, the Starship Enterprise appears just next to Big Ben

Don't think it's the Enterprise..the nascelles look too big. Unless it was just jumping to warp, in which case you might see some elongation, assuming the exposure time was right.

Carl, London,

i think thats voyager, its much more sleeker but well spotted!

kev jea, birmingham, w midlands

This is the one that they tried to test in Grand Central Station - the security has a hissy fit at someone daring to try to use a camera, and threw them out.

Phil Culmer, Southend on Sea,

More detail in one image yes please... I must congratulate them on an excellent example of night time photography. Its the first time I have seen this level of detail online, simply amazing and it all works on my 1meg ADSL, now thats saying something. To the creator of the Big Ben Gigapan well done

Gary, Totnes, England

More pixels doesn't make the photograph better, it just makes it bigger. What G. Plant said!

M.R., Stockport,

I have build my own motorized panorama head: GigaPanBot , it supports heavy DSLR cameras. And check out the resulting panoramas I shoot last weekend:
http://www.gigapan.org/viewGigapan.php?id=5171
or
http://www.gigapan.org/viewGigapan.php?id=5113
Have fun, ET

ET, Munich, Germany

Uncanny - I followed Stuart of Redbourn's advice and sure enough the Enterprise is there - The end of the world is nigh ! anyone fancy a pint ?

John, Watford, England

"When it comes to information theory, you can't beat Nyquist---you can sometimes trick 'em, but you can't beat 'em."

Ah, you can, to an extent. It's possible to recover extra scene detail from the aliasing in a sequence of images. That is how micro-scanning and super-resolution work.

James Lynch, London, UK

350 pictures would take several minutes. How does the software deal with moving objects in this instance? For example a boat moving across the whole scene. In the example of London at night does that mean that the time on Big Ben does not necessarily represent the time in other elements of the photo

Jon, Guernsey, CI

Has anyone noticed in the example picture of London, the Starship Enterprise appears just next to Big Ben (on the right by the clock face if you zoom right in).

Maybe we should inform the Vatican?

Stuart, Rebourn, UK

Nothing new here. This has been possible for many years with a simple point and shoot camera and the right software. See here for an example: http://www.tawbaware.com/maxlyons/gigapixel.htm
A little knowledge of nodal points helps to perfect an image, but a robotic tripod is a bit much, IMO

Ray, DC,

Been doing this technique for years now. All with equipment I have had for years more than that.

Bob, Tempe, U.S.A.

Oh no! Objects in photographs out of focus!!!! How terrible! That must be why photographers have been using shallow depths of field or object-specific focus for decades now.

If I wanted EVERYTHING in focus I would shoot at f22 with a large format camera.

Marian, Houston,

I have had a unit that does this for over four years.

Rick, Severn,

Here's the trick some people aren't getting: you put a very strong zoom lens on the camera. So your overall final perspective isn't necessarily bigger (although it can be) but your photo is made up of dozens or hundreds of zoomed-in photos, which is why the effective resolution is so much better.

Paul, Denver, CO

There will be extra detail (relative to a wide angle exposure) if an optical zoom is used for each of the individual exposures. When the exposures are combined, the software can present the composite image as normal size. When you choose to zoom into a specific area, the extra detail will emerge.

Mike P., Dayton, OH, USA

as mentioned by others here, this is not special. Estate agents have been using motorised mounts to take panaramic shots with special software to create website pan views for ages. And it costs a few hundred pounds not tens of thousands.

andy edan, oxen, uk

A pixel is a pixel is a pixel. If the CCD is from an ordinary camera then the picture may be 100 times larger due to the panning but that's not equivalent to a higher resolution. When it comes to information theory, you can't beat Nyquist---you can sometimes trick 'em, but you can't beat 'em.

G. Plant, Honolulu HI, USA

Sorry, nothing special here except a very carefully aligned series of photos so that stitching together is easier. In the example shown, you get the exact same detail in zoom that you would with a single Canon S5 camera (I have one).

So there is no EXTRA detail. Just a much bigger picture.

hammer, neverneverland, Far away

Not terabytes. Eventually we will need Petabytes then Exabyte.
1000 terabytes or 1000 petabytes.

Michael Turner, Winter Park,

Yawn — been doing this on a Macintosh for years (actually, since 1994) !

James, Interlochen, Michigan, USA

This is kinda cheesy. ;)

Martin, Dallas, USA

These devices use a combination of image registration and super-resolution. The "overall exposure" you mention in the article comes from in-scene motion (a man walking for example) that goes against or is in addition to the overall motion of the camera, which at present cannot be corrected for.

James Lynch, London, UK

Will each Gigapan pic take 15 minutes to load?

Joe, Tampa,

Well Wailer of Washington, if predictions about new storage devices are true, you won't have to wait that long before you can get them.

Bill Q, Derby,

I guess I need more terabytes to save all this to my computer!

Wailer, Washington DC, USA