I for one am very impressed that a machine took such a large photo as you describe. It must have been an awful lot of work for you to touch a few buttons.

You should try, sometime, taking a photo in challenging conditions, such as at night, when you actually have to put some effort into making the raw data look anything like what the eye would have seen at the time.

Did you even look at gigapan.org before posting your image and web site? The image is very nice, and I commend you for it, but your “grueling details” are a bit outdated. A 1.39 gigapixel image is now relatively small. If you go to the gigapan.org web site and sort by size, you’ll find many panoramas (gigapans, as they are called) greater than 1 gigapixel in size. Except for the obvious computer generated images, these gigapans were taken with a GigaPan robotic camera mount and stitched with the GigaPan stitcher, or, on rare occassion, AutoPano Giga. Several of us “Gigapanners” have taken panoramas with more than 1500 individual frames. Of course, with any image that size taken over an extended period of time, any movement can be captured in the sequence of frames, especially when using a long focal length.

In the Most Popular category, my Hanauma Bay gigapan (5.63 gigapixels) is second only to the Barack Obama inauguration. You can detect movement in both panoramas, but especially in the Hanauma Bay shot, due to moving people, wind, waves, moving clouds, etc.

I hope you read up on GigaPan and the Global Connection Project based out of Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and decide to join the endeavor!

Aloha from Honolulu,
Richard