This image is a 42-frame micromosaic taken with the Canon 5D MkII and a research trinocular microscope at a magnification of x50.  It is the cross-section of a Curcurbits stem, an image I have done before, but not at this magnification.  The resulting 42-frame mosaic came out at 25,000 x 23,000 pixels and is the largest photomicromosaic I have assembled to date.  Well I guess Photoshop CS3 did the assembling using the Photomerge function, which also does a superb job on the blending as well.

Be warned – it took over an hour for Photoshop to put this together for me and I run a Quad core 2.5GHz Intel machine with 8 Gig of RAM and Windows 7 64-bit.  So it is not a lightweight system and yet it took this long to assemble.  Just flattening the final image took nearly half an hour!!

These massive mosaics are great fun (I wish I had enough clear skies to put together massive deep-sky mosaics – but even the mini-WASP array won’t help me out too much with that problem) – but in future I will try to stick to mosaics of about half this size, so around 20-frames.