Gigapanning 101

I’m off today to the first ever Fine International Conference on Gigapixel Imaging for Science, held in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania over the next several days. There, as one of this year’s cadre of Fine fellows, I’ll be given a Gigapan camera robot and photo-stitching software, and they will train me how to use it. I’m looking forward to producing my own Gigapan images, which will doubtless be primarily geological in scope, and doubtless posted here for Mountain Beltway readers’ benefit. Gigapanner extraordinaire Ron Schott will be there to conduct some of the training workshops, and it looks like fellow geoblogger John Van Hoesen and geotweeter @guertin will be there, too. So hopefully we can get all together and produce something geo-media-ish, perhaps akin to the sporadically-published PodClast. We’ll see… the conference schedule looks pretty tight, and there’s other important agenda items too, like visiting the Carnegie Museum and drinking beer. The one duty of my Fine fellowship is that over the next year, I have to shoot, stitch, and post 12 Gigapan images of my own. I’ve got a partial list going, but I’d be curious to hear your suggestions.

Here’s what I’ve got on my “to Gigapan” list so far:

Sideling Hill syncline, western Maryland
Paw Paw tunnel area, western Maryland
Old Rag Mountain feeder dikes, Virginia
Abandoned quarry in Rock Creek Park, DC
Inside of Centreville, VA diabase quarry
Inside of Culpeper, VA quarry with dinosaur footprints
Harpers Ferry area, WV
Point of Rocks, MD
Klingle Valley (metaconglomerate), DC
Calvert Cliffs, MD
Veach Gap, VA (“anticline land“)

Feel free to use the comments section below to recommend or request Gigapans of geologically significant locations in the DC area.