You’ve never seen New York city like this before. Photographer Jeffrey Martin claims his panoramic skyline shot, uploaded this week to 360 Gigapixels, is the largest photograph of the city ever taken.

The shoot took Martin over four hours to complete, and required trips to the observation deck of the Empire State Building on two separate days. “Managing the changing light, and shooting hundreds or thousands of overlapping images correctly, is a major challenge,” Martin tells artnet News in e-mail.

Jeffrey Martin, New York Skyline 360 Panorama (detail).
Photo: Jeffrey Martin.

Martin is the founder of 360cities.net and the creator of the Sphericam, a 360-degree video camera. He’s been making panoramic work like this since 2000, when he first got a digital camera. “It is simply what I do!” Martin said.

His New York photo is a mind-boggling 20 gigapixels big, and would measure 57 by 28 feet if printed on paper.

Jeffrey Martin, New York Skyline 360 Panorama (detail).
Photo: Jeffrey Martin.

By comparison, the massive, gorgeous Hubble photograph of the Andromeda galaxy released in January (the largest image ever captured by the space telescope) is just 1.5 billion pixels, or one and a half gigapixels.

Both photos, however, pale in comparison to the world’s largest photograph, a 365-gigapixel behemoth capturing Mont Blanc, the tallest mountain in Europe, which is itself dwarfed by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter‘s 681-gigapixel shot of the Moon’s surface.

Jeffrey Martin, New York Skyline 360 Panorama (detail).
Photo: Jeffrey Martin.

Taking such a large-scale image is almost even more awe-inducing for an urban landscape, which is packed with towering buildings and busy avenues.

Martin took over 2,000 shots on a Canon 5Dsr camera with a 135mm lens to create the final photo. Such a piece would not have been possible just a few short years ago. “Camera and sensor technology have improved dramatically over the last decade, allowing my job to be done in four times higher detail than when I started,” he notes.

Jeffrey Martin, New York Skyline 360 Panorama (detail).
Photo: Jeffrey Martin.

In addition to New York, Martin has also revealed panoramic views of London, as well as capturing many other urban areas in a less sweeping fashion. “I like to document the cityscapes of the world in superhuman detail,” he said.

Jeffrey Martin, New York Skyline 360 Panorama (detail).
Photo: Jeffrey Martin.