St Paul Harbor Gigapan

Thursday morning Sven and I created another gigapan of St Paul Harbor. A couple of eagles were soaring up above and we had high hopes of lots of them floating up above in the picture, but only one ended up in the final pan. Be sure to use the zoom controls on the left to zoom in and explore the photo. I used more zoom with this gigapan so it has better detail. Also visit the image at the Gigapan website for a larger image with better controls:

http://gigapan.org/gigapans/35769/

These pans are so big that they take forever to create and upload. For this photo we set up a tripod with the gigapan on top and it took 240 9 mega pixel photos in a giant grid pattern. Each photo took 4.5 seconds. Sven and I were freezing after the long wait for the camera to stop taking pictures. Then back at the museum it took 3 or 4 hours for the Gigapan software to stitch all the photos together. But the longest process is uploading the photos onto the web. The file is so big, over a gigabyte in size, that it took over 12 hours to upload. In fact, it did not work on Thursday night - the internet cut out - so Sven had to re post on Friday. Patrick