Jeffrey Martin took the photo over a period of three days from the top of the 36-story Centre Point building. The photo took such a long time to take because it in fact consists of 7886 high resolution pictures, which have been digitally ‘stitched’ together.

Previous attempts at world record gigapixels include a 26-gigapixel image of Paris, a 70-gigapixel image of Budapest, a 26-gigapixel image of Dresden, and Martin’s previous record holder from 2009, an 18-gigapixel spherical image of Prague.

However the London image broke all these records when it was taken in November 2010. The image has such high resolution that you can zoom in on fine details of apparently distant objects, for example, tell the time on a faraway Big Ben:

…or spy on people working in offices:

…or watch two old people drinking coffee:

It is these kinds of details that make it such a truly amazing snapshot of one of the world’s great hives of human activity.

(There was apparently one ‘naughty bit’, too… But save yourself the hours of searching – it has been censored.)

See the image in all its 80-gigapixel glory: http://www.360cities.net/london-photo-en.html