A remarkable composite with an incredible amount of detail, this photograph was assembled from nearly 200 different images of NYC representing 10,000 megapixels of data, all put together over the course of a year.

Photographer, engineer, and entrepreneur Dan Piech decided to capture his stunning shot of Manhattan (from a rooftop in Queens), titled A New York City Dream, in tribute to the bustling city on one of its busiest nights: New Year’s Eve.

“I wanted to create an extremely high-resolution photographic artwork that captured the vibrant energy our city continually bursts forth with—a seemingly chaotic energy that nevertheless has structure, order, and rhythm,” he says of the piece. Being spun into a ‘tiny planet’ type image, the city also wraps endlessly, a world unto itself.

To put all of the photographs together and align them in terms of subjects but also color content took around a year. The finished image can be zoomed in almost endlessly to the point where, as a physical print, it would span dozens of feet, while still retaining a crisp quality. VAST now sells prints.

From My Modern Met, “Piech launched VAST with an aim to bring fine art photographers with stunning aesthetics together with technical experts specialized in producing high resolution (1,000+ megapixel) images. VAST currently works with a roster of 11 artists who create these specialized images. Using high dynamic range imaging, focus stacking, image blending, and other techniques, these special photographs can be printed on a large scale with razor-sharp quality.”