Steve M writes:
There's an article in Wired about Graham Flint, a physicist who built "the ultimate camera" from surplus cold war equipment. He's traveling the U.S. taking a series of photographs with 4 gigapixel resolution. At that resolution you can photograph four football fields and capture every blade of grass. Don't believe it? This page from his website has a fantastic series of zoom & crops from a photo he took of paragliders off a California beach.