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Related: About this forum681 Gigapixel image of the Moon is the size of a football field.
The LROC team assembled 10,581 NAC images, collected over 4 years, into a spectacular northern polar mosaic. The LROC Northern Polar Mosaic (LNPM) is likely one of the worlds largest image mosaics in existence, or at least publicly available on the web, with 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! To create the mosaic, each LROC NAC image was map projected on a 30 m/pixel Lunar Orbiter Laser Altimeter (LOLA) derived Digital Terrain Model (DTM) using a software package called the Integrated Software for Imagers and Spectrometers (ISIS).
http://lroc.sese.asu.edu/news/index.php?/archives/874-681-Gigapixels!.html
Interactive super-high-res here: http://lroc.sese.asu.edu/gigapan/
Its hard to put into perspective just how large this image is, and so NASA has kindly provided a few comparison images to help out. The first shows you how large of an area the mosaic covers:
In all, the piece of moon that NASA photographed would cover more than a quarter of the United States. That in and of itself isnt that impressive until you find out that they photographed this are at a resolution of 2-meters per pixel!
Thats enough resolution that if you printed this image which, by the way, would weigh in at a crazy 3.3 terabytes if it was a single image file at 300dpi, you would need a sheet of paper as wide as a football field and almost as long:
http://petapixel.com/2014/03/19/enormous-mosaic-moons-north-pole-size-football-field-300dpi/#more-131749
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681 Gigapixel image of the Moon is the size of a football field. (Original Post)
progressoid
Mar 2014
OP
mindwalker_i
(4,407 posts)1. That rocks!
As a geek, I really don't like football but playing it on the moon would be cool.
Sassysdad
(65 posts)2. Very..
Cool
tooeyeten
(1,074 posts)3. Be still my heart
When science and photography intersect, awesome.