Zoomatron: a whole new way to look at charts
These images definitely were not what Virtual Earth was designed for. I'm using the mapping infrastructure as a way to view large non-map related images. You can zoom in to see more detail. 
Images

Painted Ladies of San Francisco A beautiful panorama of San Francisco by Brad Templeton, with permission. "One of San Francisco's most famous postcard views, the painted ladies of Alamo Square, at sunset with a somewhat different perspective." If you zoom in, you can see a corner of the Bay bridge in the upper right. Brad sells huge prints of his panoramas from his site.

 

Desolation Sound A panorama of Prideaux Haven in Desolation Sound, BC, August 2006. We spent a week boat camping around the Sound. That's our little boat anchored just to the right of the Madrona tree (and in the thumbnail). Our campsite is in the shadow in the lower right on a tiny island. We affectionately called it the dog crap camp because all the yachties walked their dogs there at dusk. Panorama made by the free version of Autostitch

 

Chittenden Locks Panorama of the Chittenden Locks on the Seattle Ship Canal. The Benjamin Foss heads into fresh water.

 

Elevation of Kelung This is an 1894 drawing of Kelung Island - now called Formosa, showing three different elevations from an ocean view. Zoom in to see details of the little villages on the shore. Source.

 

thumbnail We took this picture to see what a macro shot would look like with a high pixel count. The original image is 3.5 MB. When you zoom in, you can see the reflection of the lake and the deck in the left side of the iris.

 

thumbnail The Blue Marble is a photo taken September 12, 1997 of the Earth from space, showing Hurricane Linda about to make Landfall in Baja California, Mexice. Here's a web page about Hurricane Linda. Zoomed out, the Earth is distorted by the process of crunching the image, but it looks more correct as you zoom in.