I've seen some wild takes on panorama photography, but the lab rats at Carnegie Mellon University and the intelligent robotics group at NASA's Ames Research Center took the whole business to the extreme this week with their Gigapan gadget.

The robotic device attaches to any digital camera and allows a shutterbug to capture panorama shots in the billions of pixels. The gizmo isn't the most elegant hardware that I've ever seen and at $279 for something that's not even out of beta yet, you might be better off getting a digital camera with a panorama feature and some good stitching software. Nevertheless, the panoramas at the Gigapan Web site are, admittedly, something to behold.