WASHINGTON — 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, visit:
http://www.sti.nasa.gov/tto/Spinoff2008/ch_2.html
To see the inaugural image, visit: http://www.gigapan.org/viewGigapan.php?id=15374
