Figure 1 – “LRO Tycho Central Peak” by NASA / GSFC / Arizona State Univ. / Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter – LRO. Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons – http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:LRO_Tycho_Central_Peak.jpg#mediaviewer/File:LRO_Tycho_Central_Peak.jpg

A few days ago I wrote about NASA’s new photomontage of the Andromeda Galaxy taken by the Hubble Space telescope. At 4.3 Gb this is by today’s standards actually a pretty modest image. But it did get me wondering what exactly was the current record holder for world’s largest digital photograph.  Well Wikipedia to the rescue! Wikipedia claims that when it comes to digital the largest image is also from NASA but is a high resolution map of the moon.  It is 681 gigapixels, was taken by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter over four years (2010 to 2013) and is composed of 10,581 images.  This image of the lunar surface has its own website where you can zoom in and out and navigate to specific features.  Figure 1 is a spectacular image a part of the composite of Tycho crater’s central peak complex casting  a long, dark shadow at local sunrise.  And the best part is that part of the mission’s purpose is to reconnoiter the dimensions of potential landing sites.