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Wednesday, January 28, 2009

NASA camera technology captures awesome inauguration image

This is pretty cool. It is a giant photo of President Obama being sworn in where the user can zoom in and tag people in the photo. Can you find Oprah? What about Obi-Wan Kenobi standing behind Obama?

NASA spinoff technology from the Mars exploration rovers was used to capture a unique panoramic image of President Obama's inaugural address at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 20.

A photographer at the inauguration, David Bergman, used the Gigapan camera system to generate an image from a press platform. The resulting picture is a combination of 220 images with an overall size of 1,474 megapixels.

The Gigapan system is a NASA spinoff technology that can capture thousands of digital images and weave them into a uniform high-resolution picture of more than a billion pixels. The technology is the product of a two-year collaboration between NASA and Carnegie Mellon. The Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity have used the Gigapan system to explore the Red Planet for more than five years.

To read a 2008 Spinoff story about the Gigapan technology click here. CONTACT: Leave me a Houston or Texas media news tip | COMMENT: Click to leave your thoughts on this post here