Gigantic ant photo

[Tormod]

This gigaphoto of an ant is incredible.

gigapan: Another Ant!

You can zoom in to extremely small details.

[freeztar]

Very cool!

It would be even better if it was in color and had stuff labeled, but I'm not complaining.

[CraigD]

Originally Posted by Tormod

This gigaphoto of an ant is incredible.

gigapan: Another Ant!

You can zoom in to extremely small details.

The zoomable picture is very cool, but the robotic camera mount that makes them (well, made most of the ones on the site, not the ant, which was done with a scanning electron microscope) is even cooler.

Gigapan.org, the host of all these pictures, is an interesting entity. It’s a couple of academic collectives with interests ranging from history to engineering, grafted to gigapansystems.com, a company that makes the above mentioned nifty camera mount and software to support the mount, whatever camera’s in it, and the webhost software to let you view the images. So its purpose, more or less, is to promote academic interests, and to sell nifty US$300-450 camera accessories – a pretty good win-win business model, IMHO.

[Thunderbird]

Very cool, it looks like its missing a leg?

[johnfp]

Yes I believe it is missing a leg.

Now, zoom in on the end of its leg. How does it walk with those hooks? I guess they open quite wide. I wonder what the size of the tippy point is? I made a hologram of an ant one time though an objective lens. Lost mosly all the paralax, but it was a cool experiment.