An artist has released a 17-gigapixel image of Yosemite National Park that he says is the largest stitched-together panorama available.

Gerard Maynard, a New York based painter and photographer, put together the ultra-high resolution composite using more than 2,000 individual photos that he took aided by a hacked old Pixorb motorized tripod head.

"What this allows someone to do is fully immerse themselves into the work and discover," Maynard said. "You throw away issues of taste and replace them with actually finding things."

Maynard, who previously gained fame photographing Harlem, found himself out in this landscape through his work as a science photographer for the Yosemite Extreme Panoramic Imaging Project. Stay tuned for a full write-up of that effort, and its implications for geology, tomorrow. But for now, you can revel in nerdy details of the computing power required to handle a 96.5 gigabyte image.

"I have a bunch of RAID systems, so I'm moving data at about 300 MB second," Maynard said. "It takes about 45 minutes to an hour just for one of the large images to load into Photoshop. With a conventional drive, it'd take about two to three hours."

You can check out the massive image in glorious detail at Maynard's website in exchange for watching a pre-roll Obama ad. As much as we hate to do it, we heartily recommend installing Silverlight for the best viewing.

Image: Glacier Point in Yosemite. Courtesy of Gerard Maynard.

See Also:

WiSci 2.0: Alexis Madrigal's Twitter , Google Reader feed, and webpage; Wired Science on Facebook.