Image of the Day: Gigapixeled Fantasy City?

"Ocean City" by B.P. Sola

The above image, fantasy artwork that depicts a city of the future, or perhaps an city on some far away planet, is not this blog's Image of the Day. It has been placed here simply to provide you with an idea of what a futuristic city might look like.

"Matte Painting 4" by Kevin Lebras

The second image also is not the Image of the Day. It is another example of an artist's rendition of some fantasy city that is not of this time and space.

Ok, the next image is the official "Image of the Day." 
[Click the text underneath to be taken to another page to see it.]

→ Click Here ←

This image you are brought to is not a painting or a digital art creation. Even though it displays a planet where there apparently is no plant life, and its rivers are colored teal, it is not a fantasy image of a city from another world or even of Earth's own future. 

It is an actual photographic image, taken in April 2010, of a city to which any of us can travel, given enough vacation time and frequent flyer miles. This is the city of Dubai in the United Arab Emirates.  

That very prominent skyscraper in the middle of the image happens to be the Burj Khalifa building -- its height of 828 m (2,717 ft) makes it taller than any other man-made structure ever built. In comparison, the Empire State Building in New York City is 381 m (1,250 ft) tall -- so Burj Khalifa is more than twice as high. Interesting fact: Some of its elevators travel 40 mph! Even at that rate, it still would take about a minute to reach the top, and that's if you don't get a speeding ticket.  

But enough about the building, what about the image? What else is there to say about it? Well, plenty. This gets Image of the Day honors for more reasons than being a quite cool image. This actually is not a normal photograph. It is a gigapan. What is a gigapan? It is a specially prepared image consisting of many gigapixels. What is a gigapixel? Well, let me start over:  

This image is actually a panorama consisting of thousands of very high-resolution photographs that have been digitally stitched together, to create what is known as a gigapan. You know how your state-of-the-art digital camera has about 10 megapixels of resolution? That means it has 10 million pixels in each photograph, which provides very profound details. A gigapixel, on the other hand is, 1 billion pixels -- 100 times more detailed than your lousy camera. And at the time this Dubai image was created, it had the highest number of pixels than any other image ever created: 45 gigapixels -- 45 billion pixels. The image is so detailed, in fact, that you can zoom in to many areas and actually see a clear image of people standing, clocks on buildings, or car license plates. Here is a zoom shot of two guys sitting in the right-bottom corner of a balcony on one of the Burj Khalifa's observation decks:

2 guys on a balcony

Do you want to zoom in? You can do so by going to this webpage: 

gigapan.org/gigapans/48492/

Burj Khalifa