NC State University Insect Museum

In the last couple weeks, we have been working on getting our museum GigaPan imaging going (with some success). First, we integrated an AC adapter into the unit, so that we can run it without having to change batteries all the time. For those interested, we developed an instructional guide for achieving this (with initial help from Randy Sargent at NASA). Here’s the result:

The new power supply jack on the GigaPan.

Once we had a constantly-powered GigaPan, I went to work imaging our Fulgoridae drawers. The results can be seen on the GigaPan website, with an example below. Things seem to be working well, and I hope that the whole process goes smoothly when we have the final work-flow.

All of this is great, but the real reason I started this blog post was to highlight something interesting I saw being done with our previous Cicadellidae drawer. It seems a fellow biodiversity researcher (Alex Smith, aka biodiversity22), noticed a locality label on one of the leaf hoppers in that drawer that matched an area in Costa Rica that he had already Gigapanned (at least that’s what I gather – maybe the GigaPan was taken after the fact?)! This means that we now have a visual representation of the type of habitat where some of the insects in our museum were collected. All we have to do now is get GigaPans for all of our localities in the collection! Shouldn’t be hard…

After some time spent trying to get an AC adapter incorporated into the Gigapan (which we have abandoned, for now), we decided to purchase and assemble a more-or-less permanent setup. To get some advice and equipment, I went to Peace Camera in Raleigh.

First: the camera. We decided to use a non-SLR for the system. Our reasoning was based on weight of the camera and ease of use; some SLRs do work on the Gigapan, but the way we have it oriented (facing the ground rather than the horizon) seems to strain the robot. The guys at Peace Camera suggested we use the Canon PowerShot G11, which they considered one of the best non-SLR cameras. Thus, the camera was chosen…

Next: where to mount. To mount the Gigapan and camera, we bought a used copy stand. The stand came with attached lights (akin to the reptile lights I’ve bought in the past), but we wanted some good natural lighting for the process, so we detached the old lights leaving a simple stand and adjustable mount. Pretty much straight forward…

Finally: lighting. The photography guys suggested the Interfit Photographic INT217 Super Cool Lite 9 Twin Head Kit. These lights house 9 fluorescent lights each (for continuous use) and produce 5200K light, similar to daylight. The lights were huge and came with stands and diffusers, but for the price seem great.

With the components in place, our setup looks like this (for now…):

The setup: lights, camera (not shown), Giga!

More of the setup.

The result (though we’re still optimizing the workflow!) is dramatic when compared to our test image. All-in-all the final picture (totaling 190 megapixels) was composed of 35 stitched photos and took about 1 minute to shoot and 40 minutes to process. While the processing and optimization are concerns of ours (2500 drawers x 40 minutes = 2.5 months of continuous stitching!!!), we are very happy with the quality of the final Gigapan and are optimistic that this endeavor will prove fruitful. Stay tuned for future updates!