Mont Blanc panorama is the world's largest ever photograph

The world's 11th tallest mountain, Europe's Mont Blanc, is now the subject of the world's largest photograph

Cameron Macphail 22 November 2015 • 12:00am

Mont Blanc panorama is the world’s largest ever photograph — Europe's highest peak is the subject of the world's largest ever photo, which if laid out at 300dpiu would cover a whole soccer pitch

An international team led by Italian photographer Filippo Blengini has published a gigantic panorama of Europe's loftiest peak, an image which weighs in at an enourmous 365 gigapixels..

Capturing the mountain in its entirety, the photograph required 35 hours of continuous shooting to capture the 70,000 pictures that make up the portrait.

^{The sun rises over the French Alps (Filippo Blengini/In2White)}

The 'snap' beats the previous image, taken of London from atop the BT Tower and is 45 gigapixels larger than the previous record-holder, a 320-gigapixel shot of London that was published back in 2013.

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(NASA has a bigger 681 megapixel image of the moon, but it was taken by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and doesn't really fit the biggest image in the world title).

This is what the entire Mont Blanc photo looks like when zoomed all the way out:

The five-strong team spent two weeks in late 2014 at an altitude of 3500 metres (11,500 feet) enduring -10°C temperatures.

^{Climbers on the distant mountain can be seen (Filippo Blengini/In2White)}

Using a Canon EF 400mm f/2.8 II IS, a Canon 70D DSLR and a Canon Extender 2X III on a special robotic mount, they captured 70,000 photographs in every direction over 35 hours of shooting.

^{The photographer checks his equipment (Filippo Blengini/In2White)}

Post-processing and stitching the 46 terabytes afterwards took two months, and the resulting image would be as large as a football pitch if printed out at 300dpi.

The full image above can be zoomed in on using the buttons to see everything from an eagle (kilometres off in the distance) to the construction site of a futuristic €105 million cable car station.