Suzi Williams from BT, who sponsored the picture, said: 'What better way to capture that remarkable year than with a full panoramic photograph taken from its roof. The image was taken from the BT Tower's 29th floor - with the horizon 20 miles in the distance. The team behind the photo have also hidden a BT mascot in the image, with prizes up for grabs for those who find him. Laptops monitored a live preview of the images. The robotic heads are capable of 72,000 steps in a single 360 degree arc and the cameras here were set to fire four frames a second. They were mounted on Clauss company Rodeon VR Head ST robotic panorama heads and positioned in four secure locations around the platform. If the mosaic were printed out at 300 dpi, the resulting picture would cover an entire football field!ĭownloading the entire mosaic-even as a compressed JPEG file-would take nearly a terabyte of space on your hard drive, so it’s probably just easier to view it online in its interactive format.The team used four Canon EOS 7D cameras to record the 48,640 images. They will be able to determine potential landing sites and areas of interest for further study. The information obtained from these images will help NASA’s scientists plan future missions. Each collar spans 1-3 degrees of latitude and altogether, the mosaics cover from the North Pole (90˚N) all the way down to 60˚N. The moon’s rotation brought new light to some of these areas and allowed the clearest images to be used. The images collected by making “collar mosaics” by imaging the same latitude every two hours for a month. With a total of 681 billion pixels, the portion of moon that has been mapped would cover about a quarter of the United States: How large is it? Each pixel covers 2 meters of the lunar surface. The images were assembled into one of the largest mosaics available on the internet.

This newly-released image has 50x the resolution! In 2011, LROC released a different image of the same area of the moon, with each pixel covering 100 meters. Though it isn’t the first time that region has been imaged, it is the first time it has been done at such a high resolution. Over the next four years, it took over 10,500 high-resolution images of the Lunar North Pole. NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) was launched in the summer of 2009.

Interactive gigapixel images