Here's a view of the Space Shuttle you don't frequently see--a half-meter-resolution satellite photograph taken from orbit by GeoEye-1 shows Endeavour on the launchpad, ready to go.

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There was a time when a camera was its own thing. Now my phone's a camera, my computer's a camera, and it looks like pretty soon my pants could be a camera too. Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have created a thread with bundles of photo-sensitive fiber optic cables inside. The cables transmit light back to a computer, effectively turning each thread into a camera.

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Sometimes looking to the past to inspire designs of the future is inspired by nothing more than fashion, but sometimes, it actually serves a functional purpose. Enter Olympus's freshly announced EP-1, which recreate a form factor we haven't seen a lot of since the film era: a sleek, compact body with interchangeable lenses.

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Filming an IMAX 3D feature about NASA's last manned mission to repair the Hubble Space Telescope created challenges that even Christopher Nolan's crew never faced on the set of "The Dark Knight." Using only eight minutes of film, astronauts had to capture the essence of five long spacewalks using a custom-made IMAX camera as big as a submarine. Thankfully, IMAX director and producer Toni Myers was there to help.

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New York is the most photographed city in the world. The Eiffel Tower is the most photographed landmark. And in what may be a sign of the times, the Apple retail store in midtown Manhattan is the 28th-most-photographed place in the world.

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Image courtesy GigaPan and the Chicago Office of Tourism

Try this: See that bright blue sign on the far wall? Can you read it? Double-click it. Can you read it now? Now move in again. And again.

This impressive panorama is actually a collection of 592 distinct photos, shot with a Canon Powershot with a 360mm zoom, and the help of a nifty gadget called the GigaPan Epic. Plop your camera into the device and it will automatically take between 20 and several hundred slightly overlapping pictures of a scene. The GigaPan software stitches them together for you into one massive, ultra-detailed, thousands-of-megapixels collage.

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