One of my favorite things on the internet is browsing all of the astronomy images available from the various telescopes that are currently in operation. I came across one today that was pretty incredible. Its titled "681 Gigapixels!".
http://www.lroc.asu.edu/posts/738
Its basically a moasic of 10,581 individual pictures, which were collected over a 4 year period. It has over 680 gigapixels of valid image data covering a region (2.54 million km2, 0.98 million miles2) slightly larger than the combined area of Alaska (1.72 million km2) and Texas (0.70 million km2) -- at a resolution of 2 meters per pixel! Its one of the worlds largest moasics.
The LNPM was originally assembled as 841 large tiles due to the sheer volume of data: if the mosaic was processed as a single file it would have been approximately 3.3 terabytes in size!
Printed at 300 dpi (a high-quality printing resolution that requires you to peer very closely to distinguish pixels), the LNPM would be larger than a football field.
Even with the conversion, the compressed JPEG images that make up the final product take up almost a terabyte of disk space.
LNPM by the numbers:
Square image: 931,070 pixels across and down
Total pixels: 866,891,344,900 (867 billion)
Pixels with image data: 680,808,991,627 (681 billion)
NAC images: 10,581
Image tiles (256x256): 17,641,035 (18 million)
Mass storage of tiles: 950 Gigabytes
Here is the thumbnail of the entire image:
And here you can jump in and examine each picture and zoom in on the entire image.
http://lroc.sese.asu.edu/gigapan/
Pretty amazing what they can do with computers these days!
