Technical note: The use of Zoomify to show landscape (or any other) panoramas allows for extremely high-resolution images to be viewed on nearly any internet-connected computer. Instead of loading a 300 mb file all at once, for example, Zoomify tiles the original image into hundreds or thousands of smaller files that are easy to load- even on a dialup connection. Zoomify uses an ingenious implementation of Flash to accomplish this task. However, instead of the content being a Flash movie, it is the viewer that is the Flash movie. Thus, when you are looking at a panorama in Zoomify, the picture changes according to the embedded instructions of the viewer that presents the panorama to you. The viewer for these panoramas is sized at 800 x 500 pixels. Besides enabling the viewer to fit nearly any monitor, 800 x 500 is also a golden proportion as consecutive elements in the Fibonacci series of numbers, where the next number is the sum of the previous two numbers, i.e. 0,1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21,.... The golden proportion (in this case, 100 times the principal numbers 8 and 5) is a pleasing shape for a rectangle. Throughout history, artists and builders have used the golden proportion in their works of art and architecture.
