Italian photographers Filippo Blengini and Alessandra Bacchilega have taken the world’s largest photograph: a monumental 365 gigapixel shot of one of Europe’s highest mountains, Mont Blanc.
Dubbed the in2white project, the photograph dwarfs even the stunning image of the Andromeda galaxy released by NASA and the Hubble Space Telescope earlier this year as part of the telescope’s 25th birthday celebrations.
The only photo that can top Blengini and Bacchilega’s contribution is quite literally out of this world: a 681 gigapixels panorama of the Moon’s surface captured over four years by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, completed in 2014.
The duo and their international team spent two weeks last year visiting the alpine peak, which straddles France and Italy, shooting at 11,500 feet in sub-zero temperatures.
The spectacular resulting shot is made up of 70,000 images. To ensure that the individual shots were seamless, the five-person team used a robotic mount to help them in their quest.
After 35 hours of shooting on three different cameras, Blengini and Bacchilega went back to the studio and sifted through 46 terabytes of data. The post-processing and stitching together of the individual photos took a full two months. If you were to print out the entire photograph at 300 DPI, it would fill an entire football field.
“We were brave, crazy and ambitious enough to think about a gigapanoramic picture, to seize every single detail of the mountain,” reads a statement on the project’s website. “We just wished to represent it as it shows to our eyes: major beauty, astonishing magnitude, pure elation.”
As massive as the Mont Blanc photo is, the in2white project isn’t finished: Blengini and Bacchilega plan to return to the mountaintop, shooting two additional panoramas, taken from different angles.
Check out a video on the making of in2white below: