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Tech

The Large Hadron Collider Is on Google Street View

No matter that it's kind of the opposite of "street view."

Honestly, I'd much rather see more locations that are super-remote and rarely photographed added to Google Street View, or maybe some of the large part of the exterior world Google has yet to Street Viewify, but I'm not going to complain about my newfound ability to tour the subterranean corridors of the Large Hadron Collider. China has its own street view offering anyway.

Putting together a Street View tour of one of the largest and most expensive science projects in history wasn't a paricularly easy task; the mammoth detectors and tunnels of the collider took two full weeks to photograph. “Every three meters, they took a six-sided panorama of the tunnel,” CERN photographer Max Brice told Symmetry Breaking. “Then we had to figure out the coordinates of every image. It came out to 6000 points for us to track.” This was in 2011; stiching everything together into the finished product took an additional two years.

That finished product is broken into five parts: four detectors (ATLAS, CMS, LHCb, and ALICE) and a large portion of the tunnel.

@everydayelk