“Wow. This is freakin’ cool,” said the e-mail to me from Online Editor Matt Quandt. And indeed it is. Check out this interactive super-humongous panoramic image of President Obama’s inaugural address, courtesy of NASA’s Pancam.
Photographer David Bergman captured the image. You can read about it at his blog, DavidBergman.net. The magic of the image reveals itself when you access the zoom-and-pan version, "President Barack Obama's Inaugural Address by David Bergman." The image at right is a zoomed out view, and the image on the lower right is a zoomed in view.
The panoramic camera (Pancam) and its housing assembly was created by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Cornell University for the Mars missions. Mounted atop each Mars Exploration Rover, Spirit and Opportunity, the Pancam mast assembly (PMA) can tilt a full 180°and swivel 360°, allowing for a complete, highly detailed view of the martian landscape.
The rover Pancams take small, 1 megapixel (1 million pixel) digital photographs that are stitched together into large panoramas that sometimes measure 4 by 24 megapixels. Gigapixel images are more than 200 times the size captured by today’s standard 4-megapixel digital camera.
Well, time for me to shut up already and let you get to the image. Enjoy.