William Storage and Laura Maish 
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We've made two image sets of the Maltese Falcon using the Photoshop HD View Export plug-in made by Microsoft Live Labs. One image set is displayed  with a viewer we wrote, starting with Silverlight source code published by Microsoft. The other set is displayed using Microsoft's HD View viewer. The Silverlight viewer supports multiple platforms (currently Windows and Mac OS) and browsers (Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari). The HD View viewer is Windows-only, but uses hardware acceleration and can therefore do some neat tricks. HD View was created by Microsoft's Interactive Visual Media Group

Click the image below below to use the Silverlight panoramic image viewer (Windows and Mac).

Click here to use the Microsoft HD View viewer (Windows only).

The original image is 16,000 by 11,000 pixels, stitched from 18 photos taken on San Francisco's Embarcadero. We shot each with a Canon 5D camera and a Canon 85mm lens at f/8 and 1/640 sec. at ISO 200. A few stitching artifacts are visible; a large moving object close to a stationary (striped, no less) background was more than the stitching software, PTGui, could handle, despite being best of breed at dealing with such issues. The Silverlight viewer progressively loads image files of increasing detail as you zoom and pan with the viewer. If you view every spot in this image at maximum resolution, you will be downloading 2800 jpeg files into your computer's internet file cache.

Use your mouse wheel or the provided buttons to zoom in and out on the HD View image. the buttons will disappear to allow an unobstructed, black-background view of the image, but they'll reappear if you move the cursor over them. Depending on your internet connection, it may take a while for the image to become clear after panning or zooming.

This image is of the Maltese Falcon, the world's largest privately owned yacht, moored near Pier 39 in San Francisco on Oct. 26, 2008. Bigger than it looks in this photo (note man on deck and two men on roof of adjacent building), at 289 feet in length, it has 26,00 square feet (2400 square meters) of sail area. Read more about the Maltese Falcon here.