Cecil the lion and endangered species glow on the Empire State Building

A 106m image of Cecil, the famous lion killed in Zimbabwe earlier this month, whose killing has sparked global outrage, also appeared.

The iconic Empire State Building in New York was the venue of a “first-of-its-kind” event where images of endangered animals like snow leopards, tigers and a giant photo of Cecil the lion were flashed across its facade, drawing huge crowds of spectators.

The video display-375 ft. tall by 186 ft. wide-was made possible by not one, but 40 20,000-lumen projectors stacked on top of each other, manned from a nearby rooftop.

Psihoyos’s Oceanic Preservation Society, in collaboration with Travis Threlkel’s Obscura Digital, have been producing the elaborate light shows for four years to draw attention to the rapid rate at which species are dying out. Threlkel told the New York Times.

The “Projecting Change on the Empire State Building” show was created by Louie Psihoyos, director of the Oscar-winning 2009 film “The Cove”, which raised awareness of Japan’s brutal dolphin-hunting industry. “The whole planet could be on the same page for once; anybody with a cell phone or computer would know about it”, he said.

The project, which cost more than $1 million, was part of a promotion for “Racing Extinction”, a Discovery Channel documentary about the mass extinction of wildlife.