The Large Hadron Collider Is Now on Google Street View

As reported by Motherboard: Honestly, I'd much rather see more locations (like the Galapagos) 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 (LHC) on the French and Swiss border. 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 particularly 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; stitching 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.