Last week the U.S. Department of Energy gave a green light to a project that aims to build the largest digital camera this planet has ever seen. The camera, built by the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory for the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, will cost around $170 million, be roughly the size of a small car, and be able to capture 3.2-gigapixel photographs using a giant sensor composed of 189 CCD sensors.

Sporting an 8.4-meter-diameter primary mirror, the LSST will be a large, wide-field ground-based telescope designed to provide time-lapse 3-D maps of the universe with unprecedented depth and detail. Of particular interest for cosmology and fundamental physics, these maps can be used to locate the mysterious dark matter [...]

[...] Each night, the LSST will take more than 800 wide-field 15-second exposures, each covering 49 times more sky area than the moon. It will photograph the entire visible sky twice a week. [#]

The lens/telescope will be quite a beast as well — it packs “enough resolving power to distinguish [...] a pair of car headlights seen at a distance of 400 miles.”

(via Stanford via R&D via Rob Galbraith)

Image credits: Photographs by LSST Corporation

The record for world’s largest camera is currently held by an aircraft hangar camera, but back in 1900, a photographer by the name of George R. Lawrence built the massive camera seen above. He was commissioned by the Chicago & Alton Railway to shoot the world’s largest photo of one of its trains — a photo measuring 8 feet by 4.5 feet. The camera weighed 900 pounds, required 15 men to move and operate, and cost a whopping $5,000 — enough money back then to buy a large house.

The Mammoth Camera of George R. Lawrence [Simon Baker]

If you’ve ever wondered how an art gallery would display the world’s largest photo taken by the world’s largest camera (and aircraft hangar), check out the above artist render of an exhibition that’s opening tomorrow at UC Riverside. The 32×111 foot photo will be wrapped around a two story atrium at the Culver Center of the Arts.

The Great Picture (via RESOURCE MAGAZINE)

Just a couple months after we reported that a 45-gigapixel photo of Dubai had become the world’s largest, a new panorama has arrived to steal the crown. 70 Billion Pixels Budapest is a 70-gigapixel panorama of Budapest created using a setup of two 25-megapixel Sony A900 cameras fitted with 400mm Minolta lenses and 1.4X teleconverters. Four days of shooting resulted in 20,000 images, and an additional two days of post-processing produced a single 200 GB file. If printed, the size of the photo would be about two apartment blocks long and ten stories tall.
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Everything big is Dubai. They boast the world’s tallest building, the world’s largest shopping mall, and now the world’s largest photograph. Gerald Donovan recently created the 45-gigapixel panorama of the Dubai skyline as a technical test to explore the limits of hardware and software. At the end of last year, the largest photo in the world was a 26 gigapixel shot of Dresden, Germany.

Robotic panorama devices are making the creation of gigantic photographs easier and easier. Donovan used a Gigapan EPIC Pro to create his image, along with a Canon 7D and 100-400mm f/4.5-5.6 L at 400mm. After 3.5 hours of shooting, he had 4,250 JPG images that took up 27.5 GB of his 32GB memory card. If the photograph were to be printed, it would result in a print the size of nearly 1,200 billboards.

Check out the photograph over at Gigapan.

Here’s a behind-the-scenes video showing how the photograph was made:

You can also check out the previous largest photographs in Wikipedia’s article on the subject.

Image credit: Photography by Gerald Donovan