NASA-Derived Technology Captures Unique Inaugural Image

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 based on the panoramic camera system that the Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity have used to explore the Red Planet for more than five years. The Gigapan system was developed through a two-year collaboration between NASA and Carnegie Mellon University.

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