Charles Babbage's difference engine—the mechanical precursor to today's digital computers—is a beautifully intricate machine. Now, you can take a real close look at it using this gigapixel image.

If you feel that your pictures sometimes lack fine-grained detail, they probably do. At least, they do compared to photographs taken with a new supercamera developed at Duke University, which is capable of instantly acquiring images that pack in a staggering 960 million pixels.

Navigating through a giant, massively detailed photo should be freaking amazing, not confined to a tiny control panel like it too-often is. The Gigalinc project from the University of Lincoln takes all the coolness of humongous photos and lets you control it with Kinect gestures. Awesome.

Jeffrey Martin, the master of gigapixel pictures, has brought us inside Wembley Stadium during a live soccer game. Like his previous iterations, you get to pan, zoom, pull and see a moment frozen in time. And as alway, it's amazing.

But really, I'm biased, because I live in that fine city you see captured in Jeffrey Martin's photo: London. 7,886 individual photos were stitched together to form an 80-gigapixel panorama, which can be zoomed-in and out over here. [360Cities]

In order to create the most interactive 3D-map of Mars ever, NASA had to process 13,000 gigapixel HiRISE images for three years. Now that they've finished, the map will let people see Mars better than most NASA scientists ever have.