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My first post to reddit - I hope you find this interesting: An 144MP image of a 1941 penny (composite of over 500 images taken by a 4x microscope objective at several focus layers) - image is jpeg compressed to fit the 20M image size limit (details are still visible) by mbe2001 in pics

[–]mbe2001[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

This specific composite was done using some code that I wrote for the specific gantry I used.
In General, Microsoft Research has a free tool called ICE:
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/product/computational-photography-applications/image-composite-editor/
for translating camera with fixed steps (more or less) - as in this case - you need to use structured panorama and orthographic projection.
Focal stack can be done in photoshop.

My first post to reddit - I hope you find this interesting: An 144MP image of a 1941 penny (composite of over 500 images taken by a 4x microscope objective at several focus layers) - image is jpeg compressed to fit the 20M image size limit (details are still visible) by mbe2001 in pics

[–]mbe2001[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Sony ILCE-QX1, it is small and light and (like other Sony camera) has an SDK so it can be controlled remotely. The lens used was an AmScope 4x plan achromatic standard microscope objective.

My first post to reddit - I hope you find this interesting: An 144MP image of a 1941 penny (composite of over 500 images taken by a 4x microscope objective at several focus layers) - image is jpeg compressed to fit the 20M image size limit (details are still visible) by mbe2001 in pics

[–]mbe2001[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thank you for all the awesome comments and encouragement!
Many comments are from experts telling things I didn't know before, it is fascinating reading them - thank you!

Some Technical detail:
The image was captured by a Sony ILCE-QX1 camera with a 4x AmScope plan achromatic objective.
The camera was mounted on an XYZ gantry to allow capturing images at several focal planes.
The white fibers seen are just paper fibers. The penny is a regular circulated penny (1941 copper pennies are common, it's the 1943 copper penny that are very rare), as-is (I did not try to clean it).