An international team of photographers has published what they say is the world’s largest photo, a panoramic shot of Europe’s Mont Blanc that measures a whopping 365 gigapixels.
The team spent two weeks in the Alps last winter, using multiple cameras to snap 70,000 high-resolution images that were then stitched together to form the sweeping 360-degree panorama.
It tops the previous record-holder, a 320-gigapixel bird’s eye view of London published in 2013.
The full, interactive photo is available on the team’s website, in2white.com. It allows you to pick any spot in the frame and zoom in to reveal tiny hidden details, such as two mountain climbers scaling the peak’s rocky face.
To put its size in perspective, the new image’s resolution is about 45,000 times greater than photos snapped with an 8-megapixel iPhone 6. Photo blog PetaPixel says that if you printed out the photo at the industry standard of 300 ppi, or pixels per inch, it would be as large as a soccer field.
(NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has captured a bigger 681-gigapixel image of the moon, but it was taken in space. Does that count as the biggest image in the world? Most observers say no.)
The Mont Blanc team was led by Italian photographer Filippo Blengini. For you camera gearheads, they used Canon 70D DSLR cameras with a Canon EF 400mm f/2.8 II IS telephoto lenses and a Canon Extender 2X III on a special robotic mount.
Mont Blanc, on the French-Italian border, makes a majestic subject for such a project. At 15,781 feet above sea level, it’s the highest peak in western Europe.