If you can get yourself Downtown on Thu., Sept. 23, between 11 a.m. and 2 p.m., look for the US Steel Tower. (It's not hard -- you can see the damn thing from like I-79 South, in Washington County.)

Then look up ... and if you get the timing right, you should eventually find yourself in Carngegie Mellon University's Public Gigapanorama.

According to CMU spokesman Eric Sloss, it's the first-ever attempt by the folks at CMU's Studio for Creative Inquiry to take an "ultra high resolution" 360-degree image of the city.

The digital cameras Gigapan cameras, developed by CMU's Create Lab, have previously been used to photograph things like neighborhood street scenes and big open landscapes. Formatted for computer screens or other slick monitors, they have "searchable" imagery with a seemingly infinite zoom capacity.

Last year, the SCI crew did a 30-gigapixel Gigapanorama from the Steel Building. But this one's for all you lens lice: SCI is encouraging people who want in to wear a costume, carry a sign or strike a pose. The shoot itself will last two hours. SCI will post updates on Twitter every five minutes starting at 11 a.m. to announce which direction the camera will be pointing at what time. (It will move through its circuit in 10-degree increments.)

The photo will be posted online by the end of October.

CP staff would go, but we have our modeling careers to think of.

For more information, see http://studioforcreativeinquiry.org/events/pittsburgh-gigapanorama-project.