The Last Supper - in 16 billion pixels

I've never seen Da Vinci's The Last Supper in person, but maybe I don't have to anymore. There is a great site called Haltadefinizione which now has this awesome painting presented in 16 BILLION pixels. The size of the real painting is 460 x 880 cm (181 x 346 in), and the digital version is 172181 pixels x 93611 pixels! By comparison, the resolution from my digital camera is 3456 pixels x 2304 pixels.

They used a Nikon D2Xs (a 12.4 megapixel camera) with the AF-S Nikkor 600mm f/4D IF-ED II lens. To get the high resolution version, they took a total of 1677 shots!!! They then used 2 Two Quad Core AMD Opteron™ processors with 16 Gigabyte RAM memory and 2 Terabyte hard disk space to stitch the photos together.

The final presentation is here. Pick an area and start zooming in. It's amazingly detailed. I spent about an hour looking at it already. Also pretty awesome is the "understand" section, which I highly suggest checking out. So head on over there and marvel at the pixelation!