Pixiq

Do you remember the 80 gigapixel panorama of London that we featured in November? (No? Here’s a reminder.) Well, the guy behind it, Jeffrey Martin, has just unveiled a 40 gigapixel picture taken of the Philosophical Library of the Strahov Monastery in Prague, Czech Republic. This, apparently, makes it the largest ever indoor picture. Forty gigapixels is a lot of pixels, people. If it were printed out, the picture would be 23 long and 12 metres tall. Nope, that won’t fit in the Small Aperture Mansion.

The picture – okay, 2,947 images that have been stitched together – was shot on a Canon 550D with a 200mm lens. It took five days to capture. I don’t want to think about how long it took to edit. You want to know? Deep breath, then: over 110 hours. I go goggle-eyed after a just a few hours of editing. The detail on it is so fine that you can see the brushstrokes on the ceiling’s Baroque fresco and the creases in the spines of the library’s 40,000-odd volumes.

I think I might’ve just lost a chunk of my evening dedicated to zooming in and zooming out of this. You can do so, too, on the 360cities website.

(Headsup to TechCrunch.)