Jeffrey sez, “I spent the last 4 months stitching 48 THOUSAND images together into a single panorama which lets you see things up to about 15 miles away.
This image is about 4 times larger than the previous world record image, a 114-gigapixel image of Shanghai (at the time incorrectly labeled as 271 gigapixels)
The panorama was shot from the top of BT Tower, using 4 cameras, lenses, and robots for moving the cameras. Three photographers using about $100,000 of gear spent 5 days up there. Ultimately we used 1 set of images which was shot over 90 minutes.
Stitching was done on two workstations with 192GB and 256GB of RAM, using Kolor Autopano Giga stitching software.
Sadly, the software choked on the gigantic dataset, and the stitching work ended up taking about 3 months longer than planned. This took a serious toll on my mental health. I am extremely happy to be finally putting this image out to the public and letting it see the light of day.
Of course there are errors in the image. In the end we had to deliver it to the client with a deadline which had already slipped by months. At any rate, there are FAR fewer errors in the image that I expected.
I hope you enjoy it. Can anyone find the pig?”
BT Tower 360 Panorama of London
(Thanks, Jeffrey!)