Before the inauguration I wrote about CNN and Microsoft's plan for a Photosynth shot of "The Moment." Boring. Sorry guys I was expecting a lot more and I'd be dishonest if I didn't say I was disappointed. If I had it to do over I'd tell you instead to be on the lookout for David Bergman's panorama. His is the money shot!

Covering 194.19 degrees of width, 80.09 degrees height this composite is nearly 1.5 gigapixels--59,783 X 24,658 pixels! No one camera or lens could provide that kind of resolution so Bergman relied on 220 separate shots.

"I made a panoramic image showing the nearly two million people who watched President Obama's inaugural address. To do so, I clamped a Gigapan Imager to the railing on the north media platform about six feet from my photo position. The Gigapan is a robotic camera mount that allows me to take multiple images and stitch them together, creating a massive image file.

My final photo is made up of 220 Canon G10 images and the file is 59,783 X 24,658 pixels or 1,474 megapixels. It took more than six and a half hours for the Gigapan software to put together all of the images on my Macbook Pro and the completed TIF file is almost 2 gigabytes." David Bergman

The GigaPan Imager is built for nothing larger than point-and-shoot cameras and takes most of the manual labor out of complex multi-shot, gigapixel size, panoramas.

"The GigaPan Imager uses the same panoramic photo technology as the Mars Exploration Rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, used to collect amazing panoramic images of Mars. The original GigaPan Imager prototype and related software were devised by a team led by Randy Sargent, a senior systems scientist at Carnegie Mellon West and the NASA Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., and Illah Nourbakhsh, an associate professor of robotics at Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh."

Currently priced at $279 this is about the geekiest photo accessory you can imagine. Use the force wisely.